Maji Love 1000% - STARISH CD review

Title: Maji Love 1000%
Artists: STARISH
Release date: 20 July, 2011
Version: N/A

Packaging: While the packaging itself is rather basic for a CD single, jewel case with booklet and back cover, it has some nice touches that make it stand out. The cover is a good example as instead of just having the characters in any random pose they are set up to be miming part of the title song with Jinguji Ren and Ichinose Tokiya making the heart to cover the "Love" while the other four make out the "1000%" with their hands. It is a nice creative touch that makes it memorable. The CD itself is picture labeled with images of the characters.

The lyric booklet stands out for not just having the lyrics for the two songs on the single but also has the breakdown of who sings which lines of the songs. As an idol fan in general I love this as it helps when you are not too familiar with voices in a group. And having images of the characters with their names is good too for helping those who may not have gotten down all the faces and names.

Honestly the packaging for this looks better than what you get with most idol singles that tend to be much more bare bones.

Tracks:

1. Maji Love 1000% - The title track and the opening theme song for the first season of the anime adaption of the Uta no Prince-sama game franchise. This is a fun and lively song that perfectly fits the tone of the anime series in its light-hearted fluff. As what will become a mainstay for the opening songs each character gets a spoken line at the start after a part of the chorus starts the song off with a bang. The verses give the characters the majority of their solo lines with the chorus being more shared lines between them all. It is a catchy song which helps it stand out among other anime songs out there, it feels like some extra care was given to it and it paid off.

2. Mirai Chizu - Scales things back a bit to balance out the title track with something more mellow. This was used as an insert song in one of the episodes and fits for the story line of that episode. That said it can stand on its own just fine. The soft verses mainly sung as a group or with shared lines move into a chorus that has a nice uplifting sound to it and focuses more on solo lines for everyone. I am a sucker for a song that has nice musical flourishes and this song does not disappoint at all there.

3. Maji Love 1000% (instrumental)
4. Mirai Chizu (instrumental)

I am not going to bother with reviewing the instrumental versions of the song included on the single.

Overall: A solid release for the franchise for fans but I am not sure if those who are not at least familiar with the series already will be won over. For fans though it is a must. One of the big pluses about being a fan of an anime idol group is that all the group members will get solo lines and those will be mostly evenly spread. As a fan of real idol groups I appreciate that quite a bit. For anime songs these are pretty solid with Maji Love 1000% being pretty strong in that it will not be easily lost among other songs of this genre.

If you are trying to figure out a place to start when it comes to picking up the Utapri CDs then this is not a bad pick. In fact if you are not quite at die-hard fan level this is a solid pick to help bring you in.