Pizzicato Five - Couples

With Couples, their first full-length album, Pizzicato Five still struggled to find their identity. As would be their norm, the cover art is quite stylish: a blurry color close-up of a bathroom cup, a tube of toothpaste, anf two toothbrushes. This unfocused romanticism is pleasant enough, but the vocals by Mamiko Sasaki and Ryo Kamomiya lack emotion and fail to click with the lush, Burt Bacharach-esque arrangements, making most of them that much sleepier. A few uptempo tracks stand out -- "What Now Our Love," "Odd Couple" (which naturally quotes the sitcom theme) -- but this effort still falls short of establishing the P5 personality. Read More