from here to here

The week started off with shug giving an assessment of "Sukedachi" after watching the rip: Okay I'll try to do a little review here but I'm an engineer not a writer so don't expect anything great.Aya seems to be completely at ease on stage no matter what she's doing. I think her acting has improved since Ribbon No Kishi. Totally excellent performance and of course........totally gorgeous. Had to praise Aya first.
Don't know enough Japanese to tell what it was about exactly, but figuring out the good guys and bad guys was easy. The action throughout kept me..........well, fairly attentive. By that I mean that when Aya was offstage I was tempted to pause and get back to it later. Basically I didn't have much interest when just the dudes were on. I did however watch it all the way through though.
Ami Tokito also does pretty well and looks eh, really appealing for one song in particular. Which by the way, I'm glad Aya didn't do, I'd have been so jealous. The other girl that's in the group with Ami, (not Asami) has a couple of funny moments although, she doesn't look quite as comfortable on stage. But then again in her defense, it did seem that her parts were during an ad-lib (mid-act) scene.
A lot of action with the scenery - revolving floor and such, close to being to much. I didn't notice many costume changes either, but, with Aya's tight jacket I was glad of that.
A couple of times I thought .........."okay, that's gay". It passed quickly though.
I guess I expected a bit more music being that Aya was the star. Seemed like there was only a couple of quick songs. I don't mean that as a bad thing. I think it's great that she is expanding her serious acting. I just love her singing voice and was hoping to hear more.
Overall I enjoyed it, 2 thumbnails up, can't wait for the subbed version (hopefully someone will do it, fingers crossed). A stage play is normally a dozen times better live than on video. I imagine it would have been incredible to attend.
Dang, that took an hour. I think I'll stick to my day job.
Well, don't humble yourself, shug. This was great!! And Matt reminded everyone wanting a listen before downloading the rip that there are fanrecordings in the archives

Ninja-Man found two gorgeous images on the net

Then it was time for goodies from the first Xmas dinner show. Here are the officials:

And then there was the question of what was served at that event: which was quickly answered by mister.mori:

Menu
- Chinese Appetizers
- Fukahire (shark fin) Soup
- Suzuki (a kind of fish, not the car maker ) with Grilled Mozzarella Cheese Eggplant
- Bordeaux (?) Style Three-meat Combination Platter (...so i guess...French style...? )
- Dessert
- Coffee
- Bread

sounds good to me! but the most delicious thing at that dinner show would have most definitely been Matsuura Aya! ( sorry, i just couldn't resist!) i figured i might as well translate the message on the other side as well. "I'm happy you came to meet, see, and hear me. I'll put my heart into my singing."

Leave it to sailormari to make a good suggestion :-) hmmm maybe for some extra money they put the dinner on Aya and you eat it off her like those sushi girls. Which of course prompted several remarks... by silenceglaive I highly doubt and we all know Ayaya wouldn't do that anyway ... Okay I'd not eaten most of it since I eat no fish But I would have gone there anyway, Ninja-Man <insert perverted comment about licking the plate clean here> Sadly silenceglaive is right and Matt though in which case it is a good thing you eat with chopsticks, and not fork and knife...

And Matt desperately wants his pair of Aya chopsticks... atstrbcks agreed Make every meal taste that much better

Matt added two interesting items to the archives: Two cute commercials for Enjoy CM (a site which wants to support the acceptance of commercials), one with Aya as ventriloquist with a little Aya doll and Aya's second musical "Sougen no Hito" about which Fumi added This musical is made from poetry by Misora Hibari who is most famous enka singer ever in Japan! now she is no longer in this world but still most famous! I have heard these songs, I have album, these songs are very fine and of course Matsuura is great singer! I wish I will see this musical in life with Matsuura acting and singing. Just click the pictures to get the archive links. The second cm pic got zam to remark Hehehe... Ayaya remind me of Koharu in this orange dress
I'd love to see Ayaya and Koharu do a duet to a song similar to Ne~e... it would be super super cute!

Chobi agreed onthis one and also posted some new officials as well:

And continued with a veoh link of Aya covering Hikaru Utada's "First Love" on "Minna no Terebi" (which can also be found in the archives of course)

mister.mori reminded us of the wonderful Uta Doki episode with Aya singing "Hikoukigumo" to which Matt added I loved her singing it at the Factory Opening back in 2002 (barefoot mind you...those were the days...). It's such a wonderful song.

Two more nice items in the archives: A very nice segment from the Wowow Act Against AIDS concert from 2005 with talk and two performances (100kai no Kiss and Ki ga Tsukeba Anata) And You remember that "Shopping" song from "Young Town"? Well here's the other one (I was wrong - there were only two): "Osentaku". Then there are the full show fanrecordings of the two Yamagata Xmas dinner shows. Matt posted the Hiragana lyrics of the two songs in the thread btw (since both of them were written by Aya herself!). He tried romanizing them, but my converter refused too many words. Did Aya make them up. Nights4Saturn marveled Wow!! Thats pretty impressive! They actually sound pretty good too! (To be honest, for all I know she may be making words up like Matt suggests, but frankly, I'm cool with that... ), as did Vermillion: I love that song "Otensaku". It sounds like it should have been a single. It reminds me of Momoiro and Ne~e but with a more '60s style production. Really fun sounding. They put so much effort into these songs (our favorite girl even writing lyrics!) but they weren't released on CD? (that was answered by Matt: jsjn wrote in the comment to my torrent: "She has performed it during plays but it gets edited from dvd releases because of legal reasons." In other words: UFA doesn't want to dash out the doe for the copyright holders.) And Chobi went on: I was just about to ask for the 'Shopping' lyrics too. Hehe. That should have totally been a single, with Otensaku as the c/w track. But who knows, it can still happen. And how cute is it that Ayaya includes her nickname in the Shopping lyrics?! ^^ (on a sidenote: ~Dan~ put all the MBS songs on the tracker later on)

Next off rnwc posted an upload link to an interesting OPV of Aya singing "100kai no kiss" in 12 different views which he got off jps a while back. This one is in the archives upload queue, so check back there in a week or so.

silenceglaive was nice enough to post his weekly radio show review: As said last time she had her first guest to interview. It was SoulJa ... dunno that guy anyway, but it seems Ayaya is kinda a fan or so of him (Well I particulary don't like his music ...).
Beside the usual "samui samui" talk at the beginning and so on she talked quite a while with her guest. So far I only understood 3 things:
1. They talked about something they are too young for (he is 28/9? and Ayaya 21). I asume they talked about something like marriage and stuff.
2. Ayaya talked about her younger sister and / or his younger sister.
3. And I also wanna go there and get Ayaya going all crazy because of my mad english skills... Ayaya really was sugoii~~ kakkoi~~~ when he said some stuff in english. Basically you can say she was pretty fangirling about him

Odore!Morning Curry was amused at the thought of "fangirl" Aya. Matt though thought I guess our Goddess is human after all :-)

There were some discussions about new releases by Aya or GAM.While Matt thought that a new single by Aya was not very likely (boy did he turn out to be wrong...) but a GAM revival possible, Chobi pondered we're going to have to wait much longer for GAM's return; The anniversary of Miki's scandal is kind of sorta of coming up, and I don't think they'll extend her suspension for over a year ^^ Plus, I think with the release of 'Atsui Tamashii' on Pucchi Best 8 will revive GAM and Aya's careers which was corrected by mangomalte ^ huh? Miki's scandal anniversary is coming up? you mean the half year anniversary, i suppose? she was suspended 1st of June. soo... it's already been. i really hope she'll be coming back soon too... i miss GAM! *runs and downloads Atsui Tamashii* from wiki: "will not perform in January's Hello! Project tour", so i guess it'll be some time before she comes back. Chobi then added Oh oops, it was in June? I always get confused when scandals happen; I could have swore it was May Gomen. Either way, I hope her suspension ends soon. Miki was MM's money-maker, and Up-Front could really use some good income after the hellish year of 2007 ^^ Haha.

Matt had finished his rip of "Sukedachi" and put it on the tracker and the archives and posted some pics he picked off the net. First three from the enjoy-cm site (probably getting an award for some commercial), the others from a Chinese site at the time of her Shanghai concert (in one of them together with Shinji Tanimura)

zam posted a link hilarious video from the Alo-Hello2 DVD with Aya receiving a foot massage: The funny thing here is Ayaya was saying that it won't be painful and the next thing you know is shes screaming "chotto itai"

Matt found a nice little commercial for TBC Broadcasting, 2001 or 2002. The star of "Love Namidairo" proving once more her hand artistery by forming the company's letters and found some more new officials for known sets:

A newcomer, ma-chin (sorry can't put Japanese chars in the text here) was enquiring about info on Aya, and mangomalte replied: Let me introduce you to wiki.theppn.org, there's lots of nice info there. here's Aya's page. And yes, she's released 3 singles and two albums since her best of album. And if there's anything you want of what's listed there, i think most of it is available in the Matsuurian archives, thanks to Mattt. Edit: oh, and i want those chopsticks! (see above :-) And Matt added: you don't have to read the whole topic. At least for this year you can read the Reader's Digest version in the Aya Thread Weekly Review (that's if the editor manages to write it in time... )

Then it was time for RobinHead (should really be RobinSanta...) to help out all Matsuurians. He not only answered Matt's request for the radio shows he's missing by uploading torrents for All Night Nippon and Let's Do It!! on the tracker (which will be put in the archives over the next weeks), but also provided two new Utaban appearances as well

And to close off the week here are the Meringue caps:

That last one was from next week's preview, and Matt was shocked about the hair color, but more about that next week....

Cya then :-))))