Beautiful World/ Kiss & Cry
Artist: Utada Hikaru
Released: 2007.08.29
1. Beautiful World
2. Kiss & Cry
3. Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words) -2007 MIX-
4. Beautiful World (Original Karaoke)
5. Kiss & Cry (Original Karaoke)
6. Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words) -2007 Mix- (Original Karaoke)

BW/ K&C is Utada’s 19th single, BW is used as the theme song of the first of four ‘Rebuild of Evangelion’ movies titled ‘Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone’ (released on September 1, 2007) and K&C is the Freedom cup noodle CM song. The single reached #3 on the Oricon weekly charts (despite reaching #1 on three consecutive days), selling 93,518 in it’s first week with current sales of of 209,818* copies (sixth week).

My Thoughts
BW/ K&C is actually my favourite Hikki single in a while (idk, SAKURA DROPS/ letters?) but all her singles are FANTASTIC anyway… so onto the review.

Beautiful world was described as an up-tempo but sadly written song, that’s exactly what it is, it had the familiar experimental pop sounds of ULTRA BLUE and the lyrics are really good Hikki stuff. I thought it was a pretty good song to be used for Eva because the lyrics sound pretty Eva-ish but I first watched NGE when it was airing on adult swim and I was younger so didn’t get ANY of the ‘deep psychological’ crap they were giving us, robot battles were pretty cool though. Yeh, Beautiful World is BEAUTIFUL, it has a sort of ethereal feel about it and I can always replay it one my itunes without getting bored, my preferred A-Side on the single but both are good.

Kiss & Cry is the second A-Side and it was released months before the single was actually released (which I thought was a bad idea… ah well). While BW sounds very ULTRA BLUE, I thought that K&C was pretty DEEP RIVER (maybe it’s me). With strong beats and strong brass accents the song sticks in your head for a while but I think I got sick of it after 50 listens ^^. LOL some of the lyrics made me laugh, oh Hikki is love, she wanted to include the Nissan Cup Noodle thing on purpose! Hotel Lobby (Exodus) was sampled and put into this song but I’ve never heard any Exodus material.

Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words) -2007 Mix- sounds EXACTLY like the old version, blame my ears (which are pretty bad). I like this song a lot though, Hikki’s pronunciation of english is quite fluent and very understandable and I love the layers in the song. Still, they’ve done about 139710 remixes for this song, I would have prefered an actual ‘remix’ or another B-Side.

Final Judgement
5 out of 5 even if the B-side is old, all of the songs are of high quality.

#3 on the charts is pretty good, this is her best debut since Dareka in 2004 (exc. FOL but HanaDan did that), oh L’arc and EXILE. This reminded me of the Keep Tryin’ thing that happened last year too, well I expect this to sell more than those two in the long run since they quickly slip off the charts, Hikki can chart for a pretty long time sometimes and she’s got Evangelion backing her…otakus do wonders.

#2 in second week outselling both EXILE and L’arc now, if Arashi was released a week later she may have gotten #1 XD.