Yeah I’m sorry, I know she is beloved by many Vocaloid fans, many producers use her in their songs, and has been featured in many popular Vocaloid songs, but despite all that, I just can’t stand her voice most of the time. Goodbye Declaration, overrated, Shama, too high pitched and screechy, Villain, she sounds horrid, Charles, the self cover is better, Lower One's Eyes, I wish I can lower my ears, Abnormality Dancin' Girl, that’s not the only abnormal thing about her, Engawa…actually that one is pretty good, that one is an exception, Pseudo Humans…actually I like that one too, Venom…okay but those songs are old… well I really like D/N/A though…
Okay fine, so there are a few songs with flower in it that I do like, but for the most part, I just don’t like how she sounds.
Whenever I listen to a song with flower, I can’t help but find her vocals to just sound so out of place with the rest of the song. The best I can describe it is, it sounds so rough, raspy, whiny, screechy, and sometimes a bit lifeless and too robotic, which I know is a charm for most Vocaloid voices, but with flower, she just doesn’t sound good. It sounds like a mix of two unpleasant high pitched voices overlapping and how she is tuned most of the time makes her sound so static. When she growls, it sounds like a screeching cat or a croaking frog, or an old lady having a stroke, or a bunch of crows crying. She sounds like a worse version of Kagamine Len. Okay, maybe I went a bit too far there, but do you get what I mean?
I don’t know whether she isn’t being tuned right or she was intended to sound like that in those songs, but overall, it just doesn’t sound great to me. Even after getting into Vocaloid, listening to so many songs, and hearing so many different voicebanks, I’m still not used to how flower sounds. Because of her static sounding voice, it honestly makes many songs unbearable to listen to, which is why I usually listen to covers over the original. I know it might sound like an exaggeration, but having just one part of the song sound off and stick out like a sore thumb, like the vocals or one or more instruments, it’s going to break the entire thing. Now I’m not saying that flower’s voice doesn’t work at all, I’m just saying, if you’re going to use her voice, take better advantage of it by at least tuning it well to make it work with the music or have it the other way around and arrange the music to make it complement with the vocals better. So, that begs the question, is there anybody out there that is able to make flower work?
Hiiragi Kirai is a Vocaloid producer that has been mainly using flower for the majority of their songs. They started making Vocaloid songs back in 2019, and specialize in electro swing music and have delved into rock music as well. Outside of Vocaloid, they have produced songs for many artists like Ado, KANKAN, Tokino Sora and Takane Lui of Hololive, Yuu Miyashita, and Sou to name a few. A lot of Hiiragi Kirai’s songs stand out by giving them this creepy and eerie vibe to them that give them this unsettling, unnerving, and haunting feeling while also being bombastic, jazz-y, and catchy. How I would describe their music is, they kinda like Disney villain songs, but if they were more straightforward and less theatrical.
Now I bring them up because like I mentioned before, they mainly use flower. Now I’ll be honest, when I first discovered Hiiragi Kirai, I still wasn’t fond of the way flower sounded in their songs, but as I kept listening to them more, as well as keeping up with their work, their songs grew on me, to the point where not only am I a big fan of their work, I also think they’re one of the best producers to actually utilize flower at her potential.
Let me explain. One of the problems I had with flower is I always thought the tone of her voice just didn’t fit very well with the tone of most songs. Take Goodbye Declaration by Chinozo for example, the most viewed Vocaloid song that features flower:
I first discovered this song from covers, and the first impression I got from the song was a happy sounding, feeling good kind of song, with pretty uplifting beats and sounds, as well as having a cool sounding guitar solo. Not to mention, the uplifting vocals from many of the singers complement the song as well to help give it this perfect and compact vibe. However, when I decided to check out the original Vocaloid version with flower, I was hit with discomfort. Hearing flower’s gritty, raspy, and kinda broken sounding vocals singing with the uplifting happy sounding instrumental of Goodbye Declaration just did not fit well with the vibe at all and made the song sound so off. It would be like if Kurt Cobain sang The Lazy Song by Bruno Mars. Even if you try making it work, it will just not mix well together and will end up not sounding great at all.
To bring up another example, Charles by balloon or Keina Suda, if you want to know his real name:
When I first listened to the song, I thought the beginning part didn’t sound too bad, it actually started to sound like a song that flower would actually work in, but after the bombastic guitar, the tuning of flower just became off like with Goodbye Declaration. The problem I have again is that flower sounds too high pitched, raspy, whiny, and broken sounding, which doesn’t mix well with the rest of the song. It also has the problem I mentioned before, where she sounds like 2 differently pitched voices horribly overlapping, which makes it unpleasant and out of place. I’m not sure if Keina Suda just didn’t tune her right or they intended her to sound like that, but either way, I don’t like how she sounds in this song. Which is too bad, because despite how flower sounds, I still like how the rest of the song sounds. In fact, I prefer his self cover of the song way more than the original:
This goes back to the main problem I have with flower's vocals, which is that they do not mix and complement well with the rest of the song, so because of that, it ruins the entire song as a whole. It’s like when one instrument sounds off in a song, it makes the entire thing sound off. Thankfully, I don’t have that kind of problem with Hiiragi Kirai’s music. I think something that they do with their songs is something that I feel like a lot of Vocaloid producers should consider when making a Vocaloid song. The vocal tuning and the instrumental both have to be good, as well as complement each other to make the entire song work and feel more compact. You noticed that I praised the instrumentals of the songs I just talked about, but not flower’s vocals? Well with Hiiragi Kirai, it feels like they know how to tune flower well and have a good song to compliment her voice, thus making the entire song sound congruent. And it’s not just that. Remember when I described the way that flower sounds as “broken”, well I feel like Hiiragi Kirai takes advantage of how flower sounds by composing and arranging their songs by giving them this eerie and abnormal sounding vibe to them that really helps in complementing the “broken” sounding vocals. The arrangements already give the songs this unsettling vibe and the voice just conveys that even more. Not to mention, the way they make flower sound is a lot more unique than most producers that use her, which helps make their Vocaloid songs stand out more and give them their own identity. And that is what makes Hiiragi Kirai’s music so appealing to me.
Another reason why I think flower works with Hiiragi Kirai’s song is because some of his songs have a fast tempo to them, like in his songs Autophagy, Eva, and Bocca della Verita, which most people like to group together as the color trilogy.
If you didn’t know, flower was made and designed with fast tempo songs in mind, according to Gynoid themselves in flower’s official web page, where in one of the descriptions they provided about flower is that she's “A female vocal library with a powerful and crisp voice specialized for rock [1]” and a voice that “stands up to fast tempos [1]”. With that in mind, it makes the way that Hiiragi Kirai utilizes flower seem like they already knew what to do with her.
When Hiiragi Kirai first started releasing Vocaloid music in 2019 with their debut song, Vidro, it of course featured flower:
The song is definitely a lot more upbeat compared to their newer work, but the way flower is tuned is pretty consistent to how she would sound for Hiiragi Kirai’s other songs. You can tell they have gotten used to the voicebank and already had their unique way of tuning her. It wouldn’t be until the release of their 5th song, “Bulaklak”, where I feel like we would get an early taste of what would end up being Hiiragi Kirai’s style of music:
And then we would get to the color trilogy, this is where I think Hiiragi Kirai finally obtained and solidified their unique style for their music, with the fast tempos and creepy vibes.
I think after the release of their first album, Hateful, they started getting more accustomed to the style that they established for themselves, as well as making flower and the mastering of their songs sound a lot more finalized. And I think that is pretty evident in the song they posted after the release of their first album, Mobius, as well as being evident in other songs like Vita, Bottom, and Eureka to name a few examples.
One of my favorite songs from Hiiragi Kirai is Galleria, which I consider to be one of their most underrated songs, especially if you compare the view count to some of their more popular songs and the amount of covers there are:
Anyways, I have listened to some covers for Galleria, and while they were good, I always kept coming back to the original. That’s just how good I think Hiiragi Kirai is when they utilize flower when this is one of the few times where I prefer listening to the original flower version over the covers. Her voice just fits with the vibe of the song better. Because of how versatile her voice is, it just makes her mix well with many of Hiiragi Kirai's songs, especially when they decide to be experimental and go for a different tone for a different song.
I don’t know what it is with Hiiragi Kirai’s tuning of flower that makes it so appealing to me, but when I listen to it, it sounds like a complicated mix of emotions. Like is this supposed to sound like joy, enthusiasm, amusement, confidence, resentment, aggravation, possessiveness, gloom, misery, fear, intimidation, mentally unstable, a cry for help. Honestly, there’s just so many conflicting emotions to take from flower’s vocals in Hiiragi Kirai’s songs that it’s hard to tell how I’m supposed to really feel about the song. But because of the mixed emotions I get from flower’s voice, it helps make the experience of listening to Hiiragi Kirai's songs more interesting and memorable by giving them this unpredictable, ambiguous, and complicated tone that just makes them so unnerving and unsettling, yet so engaging, and interesting. And I just love that so much. That is captured in both the vocals and the music, and that combination just creates this unique experience that catches your attention and always sticks to you, like something that you can never get away from, because it lingers on and haunts you for the rest of your life.
Nowadays, Hiiragi Kirai is using flower a lot less these days, especially in their most recent songs, but they still retain the best tuning and are still able to give their song this ambiguous tone to them. And I would say they’re doing a lot better now in producing songs and tuning, and I hope they still keep it up moving forward and whatever future projects that they have in store. Even though they aren’t using flower as often as they used to, they have shown that they know how to properly utilize her to her full potential in many of their songs, and I feel like they should be acknowledged more for not just their unique style of music, but for being the vocaloid producer that mastered flower.
Anyways, there's still a lot more about Hiiragi Kirai that I would like to say, but I’ll save that for later. Tune in next time when I review their 2nd album, Scrap Farm.
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