After a great (Well, as far as I’m concerned) album and a passable single, you’d have to hope for a great single to improve the outlook a bit, wouldn’t you? Well, with titles like Lick Me, Ecstacy and Hashire!, you’d expect there to be a little bit of that inappropriate sexiness we all know and love, wouldn’t you? ESPECIALLY from the first one, if not the first two. Evidently, that isn’t what we got at all.

If you look at Lick me ♥ as a normal Kuu pop song and don’t even LOOK at the title, then it’s actually a really catchy song. I’m a fan of Kuu’s poppier, upbeat songs, and this is no exception, if you ignore absolutely everything about it (title and single-wise). That ad-libbing you hear over the heavier instrumental after the chorus isn’t exactly pleasing to the ear, and it’s the same for those sounds she INSISTS on making near the end of the video. But the instrumental is really catchy, and her vocals for the rest of the song are at least as good as the rest of her recent songs.

If you take the title into account, it’s more of a let down. Kuu’s always at her finest when she’s shoving bottles up her many orifices and kneeling on toilets in the shortest and tightest dress you could possibly imagine, and if she’s climbing up the leg of another woman, you can just consider that a bonus. Giving a song like THIS the title of Lick Me is just teasing. It had potential, and yet they left it as a campy pop song. For all I know, the lyrics could be dirty as all hell, but with an outer shell like this, that isn’t really much of a saving grace, especially when you don’t exactly understand what she’s singing.

The video isn’t exactly flattering, either. It has this whole retro feel to it, and it has a few different alter egos for Kuu in it, depicting different kinds of girls: Strawberry Girl, whose sections of the PV take place in a bowling alley; Mango Girl, who’s in a schoolbus full of people less than half her age; Bitter Choco Girl, who’s the only one that even comes CLOSE to being sexy in any sense, while all she’s doing is playing around on a single-seat couch in front of some green wall; and VANILLA AFTER ALL !1!!!1!!1!11!1! girl, who takes up the majority of the PV dancing around like a suggestive fool in an ice cream parlor. There’s nothing remotely attractive about any of these cutesy wigs or outfits she’s wearing; With the exception of Bitter Choco Girl, who I find to be passable, albeit POORLY represented, since she’s barely in the PV as it is.

I take it that the whole point of this is to show the different kinds of girls, their different personalities and the kind of ice cream that they seem to be related to. (OH, HOW SMART, A PV FOR A SONG CALLED LICK ME ABOUT ICE CREAM! I’m insulted.) Honestly, I see nothing different about any of these girls except that one likes bowling, one likes acting like a fool on a couch, one’s an idiot dreamer and another is a lesbian pedophile. It seems kind of pointless, but at the same time, it IS kind of cute. The costumes ruin it, but it does have its charm here or there. I don’t absolutely LOVE it, but once I get past my bitterness over all of this cheated teasing, I can stand it. It fits the song, at least.

One more thing to add about both the PV and the song: They seem SICKENINGLY short. The song was made in a manner that makes those three minutes and thirty seven second fly by, and I can’t really tell whether that’s a bad thing or not.

Song Score
B-

PV Score
C-

Overall Score
C

I’m disappointed that this turned out so horribly lame compared to the potential it carried, but at least the song is bearable. I can already tell I’ll never be touching the PV with a three foot shit stick again, but the overall package could have been a LOT worse. I’m hoping Ecstacy and Hashire! meet my expectations, though, because the single still has a shot with these two a-sides.