01. Twilight ST★R

02.  Colorless Device

03. the last wedding.

So. That name. Well, I was very very concerned when I saw that they would be including a '★' into the name of their single, mostly because of REALies. The problem with Cu[be]'s last single was that it seemed like the band lacked direction. Seeing a cutesy choice of typography, to me, only meant that they decided to pick a different direction, although still awkward, and I would just have to suffer through it. Surprisingly enough, though, the song is a hard-rock song (although a bit of a generic one, at that). The beginning of the song uses low guitar and bass riffs along with some fast drumming before turning into the main guitar structure of the song which is still more aggressive than what I originally expected, but very 'play-it-safe' of them. To be more elaborate: it's like a mixture of [Idon'tReallyKnowWhatI'mTalkingAboutHere]Deathgaze's groove-metal-ish power chord style mixed with a pop-punk guitar melody[/honesty]. Rara's voice sounds reminiscent of Aika's from Werkmare at this point in the song, which is pretty cool, and his growls are highly distorted to sound very cat-like. However, he still does the moaning vibrato: "yaa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-."Although I wished he would grow out of that, it doesn't look as though it's going to happen. Moving on to the chorus: here the song gets much more playful and pop-like, which seems to be a current trend in VK as of late (super aggressive intro and first chorus, poppy chorus, unneeded guitar solo, one line for verse 2, chorus 2 or 3 times, aggressive outro). I found the melody of this song to be rather forgettable. After the chorus is a return to the introductory melody, then the guitar solo. The solo is actually pretty nice because of how it starts off melodic and then morphs into a slight technical flaunt session. Overall, "Twilight ST★R" is an okay song: there are a lot of other bands who have songs like this that are probably much better. Definitely not worth the 9-month wait. If they released this in April, I probably would have thought differently; however, January to September for a mediocre song won't win you as many new fans as old ones you've lost.

Next up is "Colorless Device." This song starts off as a weird fusion of Duel Jewel's "Mxxder Marble," their own song "タナトス," and rap. Shortly after that it gets a bit more electronic based, but still holds onto a bit of the hard-rock elements found in the title track. Although there's barely any synth part in the verses of the song, the drumming patterns make it seem dance-like. The actual chorus of the song does use electronic elements as support for a pretty cool guitar melody, but it also has a "trying too hard to be poppy" flavor to it. The bad vibrato is much more apparent in this song than in the first one. Fortunately, the guitar solo in this song, like the last, is the highlight of the song.There is also a slight breakdown after the solo as well. From the looks of it, "Colorless Device" is definitely not a song for me. I'm not too fond of dance rock unless there's a lot of heart put into it, and this song doesn't have that hutzpa to me.  This definitely belongs as the B-side.

I expected "the last wedding." to be a ballad from the name of it, but, once again, it isn't. The vocals in this song start off very soft as one guitar plays a very trippy guitar riff (think the Kiryu's style of playing really warped sounding guitar) along with a music box playing. During the bridge to the chorus the vocals start to sound really out of place with the much heavier sounding guitar. I've seen other people say this about Cu[be]'s music before: the vocal melody is good by itself and the guitar's music is fine as well, but together they don't mesh. As for the chorus, it's pretty much the same deal as the other songs on this single except they added in some Luzmelt auto-tuned support vocals to make it different. Overall, "the last wedding" is okay. I think it's the strongest song on the single since it uses a lot of different elements in it, like a music box, piano for more than 2 seconds, light auto-tune, and variety in the guitar parts.