For those people on Twitter and in The Japan Times' email inbox who were upset with the mean things I said about Perfume's mediocre new album and concerned about its lack of something called "objectivity", I thought I'd offer up a cut-and-paste objective music review that they can use for all their favourite J-pop albums:
[CD title] is the new album by [J-pop group]. It features the singles [uptempo summer pop tune], [mid-paced autumn track] and [string-laden winter ballad], and fans of these singles are sure to like some of the other songs on the album too. These include [TV drama theme], [TV ad campaign song 1] and [TV ad campaign song 2], which will already be familiar to listeners who watch a lot of television, spend any amount of time in shops that have music piped by USEN, or have walked past a big TV screen outside a station. The vocals are cute and the lyrics deal with the themes of love and friendship. All the songs are between four and five minutes long. Fans of this kind of music will probably like this music.No need to thank me. You can have this one for free.
(12:32pm edit: Additional objective measures of quality suggested by Dan Grunebaum)
