|
The Lost Lolli This album is more focused bag of Olivia goodness with many moments of greatness. Olivia is really finding her sound in this album and it shows in many of the tracks from the whimsical ballad Space Halo to the rocking tunes of SpidERspins and Fake Flowers. On the flip side, Blind Unicorn is probably the worse track on the album with Olivia speaking in a monotone voice most the way though with hardly any kind of melody to speak of.
Some interesting facts about this album is that Olivia sings entirely in English even though it is a Japanese-marketed album (a poor marketing choice?) and in addition a few of her albums had “exclusive” Tower Record store distribution due to some deal with her producer (another poor marketing choice?), but it seems that you can get this album in particular at retail besides Tower Records. One can only wonder if she is making the right decisions for her music career as it seems that she is becoming less and less popular as time goes on.
As a longtime listener of Olivia, I found this album quite good and I’m glad that she has settled down with her sound for the most part. Olivia’s music is an acquired taste, as it can take repeated listening sessions to really get into it, but at least for this album is is easier to get into if you are new to her music.
|
|
Synchronicity For the first-time listener to Olivia, Synchronicity may be hard to get into, and for fans of Olivia, you will probably wonder what the hell you are listening to. Olivia is all over the place with this album - Walk on by sounds like a grunge band with bad recording equipment (easily the worst track on the album), Dear Angel, Color of your Spoon, Dress Me Up and Dekinai are your standard pop/rock tracks (with Dekinai being the best of the bunch), then you have your semi-trance/experemental/ballad tracks such as Liquid Skies, Crystalline, Grapefruit Tea and Soulmate. Olivia just seems like she is trying to find her sound and is just screwing around with various styles to see what sounds half way decent.
Olivia’s latter album The Lost Lolli is a much better outing than Synchronicity and won’t leave you scratching your head after the first few tracks. One thing that is unfortunate about Synchronicity however is that 7 out of the 14 tracks are from previously released singles...normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but when you release 6 singles before your first album, you are paying for music you already paid for (if you were already a fan of Olivia).
Overall, Synchronicity is a compilation of 7 previous singles with the new songs just adding weirdness into the mix. If you want to really get into Olivia, track down The Lost Lolli and leave Olivia’s experimenting behind.
|