Maimi + Airi Acoustic Live

Here's Maimi and Airi's acoustic live at Yokohama BLITZ.

As you can tell from the title, this concert is all about Maimi and Airi singing completely live (without a backing track), with only themselves and acoustic instruments.

In many cases, they sang songs together,

but there was also instances where they performed solos with the other member providing backing vocals,

and the two also had true solos where they performed on stage without the other, which resulted in some special moments of Airi playing guitar

and Maimi playing piano.

In between performances, MCs were frequent but pretty interesting overall. Airi was really adorable throughout, especially when Caroline Suzuki returned.

(and "slapped" her pupil)

An acoustic live is of course new to the both of them and at the same time, they took on another challenge - covering English songs. Unfortunately the awesome cover of Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend didn't make the DVD (well, it did have a lot of swearing. At least we'll always have the audio.) but Shocking Blue's Venus did. To be honest, the only prior contact I had with that song was with the J-lo commercial that aired a while ago so I didn't really know what to expect.

They struggled through the verses (I could hardly make out the lyrics, at least), but the chorus was pretty good, all things considering.

For me, the best performance was Aitai (the song starting at 1:09:57).

And right after that, they performed Sekaiichi HAPPY na onna no ko. The acoustic version they did was really nice. It made me enjoy a song I don't normally enjoy.

They both did a great job here. Maimi won the round of instrument playing & singing and overall Airi's voice shined in the acoustic setting, as expected. With this, Airi/Reina appearing on Hamonepu, Buono! performing with Dolce at concerts, etc, H!P is blurring the line between idol and artist and I love it.

This video contains two audio tracks (the main audio and a commentary audio where Maimi and Airi makes comments on the video as it goes along), chapters, and 17 minutes of bonus backstage footage.

You can download the main video and the bonus video here: http://www.mediafire.com/?xdmrf86vs3o2x

I think this is a good video to have for Maimi/Airi/C-ute fans, so if you like it, you can buy it from CDJapan (there are only two copies left as I write this, so hurry)!

PS,