Apparently this is the week where groups rise to singledom. With Love has been around since early 2014, and aside from a collaboration with Kus Kus they’ve yet to release a CD until now. The girls get a nice A-side for their first offering, but the PV? It’s…sorry, it’s kinda bad.
The first thing that sticks out to me is the setting. A majority of the PV is shot on a beach. Sea and sand are all there is to see. There are some buildings in the distance, but the landscape is pretty devoid of much else. Beach PVs can be fun, but this one is a bit dull. Hell, it’s almost melancholy in setting. There are also a few shots following the girls around an amusement park. It adds a little flavor to the PV but it’s not very scenic either, mostly thanks to my following gripe.
I think a lot of the negative feeling I have toward the setting has to do with the color editing in the PV. The entire video is dulled out and drowned to lifelessness with the trademark “Japan Filter”. It makes everything look so bad, like this PV is either 30 years old or was shot with ancient cameras. The park scenes are also pretty much ruined by the use of this filter. Aside from murdering the color, everything in the background is completely out of focus and almost indiscernible.
The outfits are pretty meh. For the dance shots, we get some dresses that look like they might have been made from bed sheets. They’re totally white and decorated with only a small frill in the assigned color of each member. The park scenes improve things with some civilian wear, so at least something in this PV is not pale and boring.
The choreography doesn’t really help or hurt this PV. You can only dance so well in sand, but even in this case I would call it barely average dancing at best. There’s no real sense of timing or intricacy to any of it, but it’s not terrible.
It’s not all criticism, though. I like the song. It doesn’t blow me out of the water but it’s a pleasant pop-rock song. The instrumentals have some good depth and production value to them, and the vocals are pretty decent. I think another thing I have against the PV is it doesn’t seem to fit the song very well. The song is more pop than rock, but the PV lacks any kind of rock edge. In any case, I can hang with this song, but its video feels really throw-away.
With Love’s first single drops June 15th.
Watch: YouTube (Official)
Buy on Amazon JP: Type A [Regular Edition]
| Type B [Regular Edition]
Buy on CDJapan: Type A [Regular Edition] | Type B [Regular Edition]
