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If I were facetious enough, I could reprint a review of Yaida Hitomi’s previous album, I/Flancy, in this space.

To quote:

I/Flancy shows Yaida has clearly chosen to maintain chart success at the expense of her creative growth. She deviates not one bit from the template that’s brought her fame. She’s working with the same producers, she’s playing with the same band.

Why reinvent the wheel when the facts are just the same?

But where I/Flancy still provided some interesting tunes, there’s not much engaging about Air/Cook/Sky, Yaida’s fourth album.

Sure, the first few tracks display Yaida’s talent for melody, but it’s not anything special that she hasn’t done better.

The Celtic touches of “Mienai Hikari”, while pleasant, aren’t new. (See “I can fly”, “I really want to understand”.) “Hitori Jenga” and “Kodoku na Cowboy” are obvious singles from the album but don’t hold up next to “Buzzstyle” or “Ring my bell”.

Perhaps even more depressing is just how lifeless Yaida’s music has become. Before, it was exuberent to the point of manic. Now, it’s predictable and generic.

She tries to toughen things up with the some heavy guitars on “Are you ready? boy” and “Mama to Daddy”, but they’re not enough to offset the 70s SoCal misstep of “Keep on movin'” or the lack of distinctiveness on “Hello” or “Slide show”.

Yaida is stuck. As much of a skilled songwriter she may be, she’s boxed herself in. Initial comparrisons to Shiina Ringo were indeed premature — Shiina has grown progressively daring, while Yaida is content to dole out the same album again and again.

At this rate, there’s not much point in paying attention to what she does next.

When Yaida Hitomi first debuted with her buoyant “heart rock”, she balanced the fickle demands of Japan’s pop audience with the more emotional and creative terrain staked out by the likes of Shiina Ringo and Cocco.

She wrote ear-catching, high-octane songs stamped with a individual identity.

But there’s nothing like familiarity to breed distress.

Yaida’s second album, Candlize, sharpened the pop instincts and watered down the rock exuberance of her debut. With album No. 3, I/Flancy, that exuberance is pretty much an after-thought.

Not that any of this matters to the Original Confidence charts — Yaida’s releases consistently top the charts, putting the singer between the proverbial rock and hard place.

I/Flancy shows Yaida has clearly chosen to maintain chart success at the expense of her creative growth.

She deviates not one bit from the template that’s brought her fame. She’s working with the same producers, she’s playing with the same band.

It’s a comfortable arrangement, and one that still yields something of a satisfactory listening experience.

Yaida still has a sharp ear for melody, as evident on “Mikansei no Melody”, “Ring my bell” and “Dizzy dive”, all of which were released on singles. In the past, Yaida’s singles were weaker than some of her album tracks.

“I really want to understand” and “I can fly” show influences of the recording sessions’ locale — in this case, Dublin, Ireland — to great effect. “I can fly” is probably one of the few Japanese pop song to incorporate Uillean pipes.

When Yaida punctuates the chorus of “Ashita kara no Tegami” with the English lyric “I don’t want to stay”, the heart in her heart rock really comes through.

But for all of the good songwriting on the album, it’s not enough to keep a listener familiar with Yaida’s work interested. Yaida has gone as far as she can go with Diamond Head, her backing band and production team since day one.

Her songwriting deserves new challenges, and I/Flancy just isn’t it.

I hate using first-person perspective in a review, but here goes …

My brother and I were comparing notes about Yaida Hitomi’s new album Candlize. He likes it better than her first one, daiya-monde. After listening to daiya-monde again, I still preferred it over Candlize.

Although my brother and I both follow the Japanese music industry with a fine tooth comb, our individual tastes couldn’t be any more disparate.

He listens to mainstream artists — Suzuki Ami, Sakai Noriko, Utada Hikaru. I’m more into rock bands and indies — Number Girl, Cocco, fra-foa.

Our respective backgrounds definitely influenced how we each perceived the album and so might yours.

Candlize is definitely much more of a pop album. The caffeinated exuberance of daiya-monde has been toned down to make room for big hooks.

That’s not to say Yaiko has lost all of her verve — “Buzzstyle” and “Look Back Again” possess every bit of energy as “B’coz I Love You” and “My Sweet Darlin'”.

But it’s the re-recorded versions of “Over the Distance” and “I’m here saying nothing” that shows how much Yaiko has pulled back.

“Over the Distance” was just a toned-down rock ballad, but on the album, it’s a sweeping epic complete with dramatic strings. “I’m here saying nothing” turns into a shade of itself with most the acoustic guitars stripped from the final mix.

Like her first album, Yaiko’s album tracks feel more polished and accessible than her singles.

“Zeitaku na Sekai” has a relentless backbeat and an incredibly catchy chorus. “Te to Namida” starts off with a great verse, then bursts into a loud, triumphant chorus.

“Maze” concludes the album beautifully on a quiet note.

There’s a lot to like about Candlize, but for folks who prefer to hear Yaiko at her most exuberent, the album might be a struggle to warm up to at first.

But eventually, Yaiko’s solid songwriting wins out at the end, and even if she isn’t belting her all, she still leaves a lasting impression.

Yaida Hitomi arrives at a time when the world just really doesn’t need another LilithFairMarketedWomanInRock. But the world always needs good songwriters, and Yaida fits that bill quite nicely.

A good number of tracks on Yaida’s debut album, daiya-monde (a play on the word “diamond,” which is part of the name of her band Diamond Head, and her name spelled backwards), will draw obvious comparrisons to artists not only in Japan but worldwide.

“Girl’s Talk” uses the kind of overproduction in which Shiina Ringo often indulges. “Your Kiss” sounds like something between Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” and Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” And “Moshimo no Uta,” a light-hearted drinking song that bears no resemblance to anything else on the album, marks the kind of left turn Cocco uses with her children’s songs.

But the rest of daiya-monde sports the kind of earnest rock that, in less skilled hands, would come across as bleeding heart at best, crass at the worst. Instead, Yaida has crafted a number of suitable hooks around her powerful voice.

It’s not difficult to fall head over clichéd heels for such keepers as “How?”, “Nothing” or the album’s emotional pinnacle, “Nee.” (It was an excerpt for the video of “Nee” that drew my attention to Yaida in the first place.)

Yaida veers manically from high-speed exuberance (“B’coz I Love You”, “My Sweet Darlin'”) to mid-tempo introspection (“Nee”, “Your Kiss”). She’s created a set of songs that puts her in league with other indepedently-minded Japanese woman but at the same time sets her apart.

Yaida would never be mistaken for Japan’s answer to Courtney Love, as E! Online once described Shiina Ringo, or Japanese Fiona Apple, as the New York Times once described Cocco. If those nasty, pigeon-hole-ing comparrisons had to be used, Yaida resembles Joan Osborne or Meredith Brooks without a hint of being a one-hit wonder.

daiya-monde is a stellar debut from a singer with the potential for staying power.