Bonnie Pink - Dear Diary (Limited Edition) (2010)

In the J-pop world, singing in English is perceived as a sign of quality -- a status thing -- and while most artists mangling cheesy foreign-language one-liners are impostors, Bonnie Pink bears out the stereotype: Dear Diary's still Japanese pop music, but one notch above an average Oricon entry. Maybe even a couple of notches, at least in places -- for example, the intro to "Morning Glory" simmers with indie-tronic textures the Go Find wouldn't be ashamed of, though it's soon lost in the sea of cheesy and simplistic guitar-keyboard interplay. It's the good kind of cheesy, however -- the naively cute, kawaii thing that's actually used to hide some considerable songwriting smarts and a suspiciously ironic approach -- or maybe not: it's hard to tell, as sometimes Dear Diary sounds like an Ayumi Hamasaki ripoff, and sometimes like Shonen Knife pretending to be Ayu, just to mess with the audience. The postmodern feel is probably incidental here, but at least Bonnie is conscious of her music, enough to realize it needs an identity -- and so attempts pushing the envelope a little, stylistically and songwriting-wise. She doesn't necessarily manage to sound different, even though she tries -- she opts for R&B here, alt-rock there, retro-pop elsewhere, but ends up re-creating the typical sunny J-pop vibe -- but at least the songs have the hooks to keep the attention from drifting. "World Peace" shows the real influence here -- it sounds like Roxette with a dash of flamenco, just to mask the similarity -- and though Bonnie Pink never beats the Swedes at their game, she also offers clever pop with substance: not a sensation, but definitely a score.