♪ Perfume - Moon (Random J Extended Mix)

A bit of a theme with Perfume’s music over the past couple of years is that they are being undersold by Yasutaka Nakata’s choices when it comes to song structures. This was something which made Plasma a bit of a weird album for me, because Nakata’s choices in regards to this was so inconsistent. At least on Future Pop it was just a problem across every song. But on Plasma, it was so baffling, because it was like ‘DUDE. HOW DO YOU GET IT SO RIGHT ON ONE SONG, BUT THEN NOT THE OTHER!?’. “Spinning World”. Worked. “Drive’n the Rain”. Worked. “Android&”. Worked. But then you had “Flow”, which didn’t fully work. “Time Warp”, which didn’t fully work. “Mawaru Kagami”, which didn’t work and was worse than the original version. And then there was “Polygon Wave”, which JUST about worked.

Nakata half cooking these songs really prevents them from being as special as they could be. And this is how I feel about “Moon”. There’s so much good in this song, but Nakata didn’t allow us to really sit in any of it long enough or create an experience for us with the music he had created. So this Extended Mix is me just trying to unlock the song. And I’ll admit. I listen to “Moon” more because of this version.

Shout-outs to J-Music Ensemble, whose amazing Jazz cover of “Moon” was used in this mix.

Short, rushed, incomplete song structures isn’t a Nakata specific thing though. It’s unfortunately become an industry-wide thing. Even songwriters and producers who have been in the game for decades and were crafting four minute songs with intros, middle eights, bridges and modulations are now stripping their songs of all that stuff and just giving us verse → chorus → verse → chorus in the shortest of forms.

Perfume’s songs have never been overly complex structurally — that’s part of their charm. But Perfume songs used to feel like being immersed into a different world, where we were given just enough time to revel in them. Where-as now it feels like the door is being opened and then closed in our faces. And I also think this is why Perfume’s material these days doesn’t stick as well as their older stuff. It’s not always the sound of the songs. It’s the fact that they are so damn short and uneventful. Even “If You Wanna” from Future Pop had the potential to be become a setlist fixture and possibly a Perfume classic, but the song was too damn short and didn’t go anywhere. And it’s unfortunate that at a time when Nakata is finally getting the sound right, that he’s letting the side down with song structures.