There's three editions available of Dress To Kill. The Normal Edition, First Press Limited Edition and Mu-Mo Edition. The Normal Edition comes with the CD and includes the Japanese version of Flashback as a bonus track. The Mu-Mo edition was a Japan exclusive and includes Lucky Girl as the bonus track and you could get member editions of the CD. The First Press Limited Edition (the edition I got) comes with the following items:
- CD - 12 track album.
- DVD - Contains two music videos, additional version of Shh music video and footage of their 2013 Japan fan meet.
- Lyrics Booklet
- Photobook - 32 page
- Photocard - random from 8 different types.
First off, I absolutely love the design of this album! The colour combinations and the mod look is amazing. One of the main reasons I wanted to buy this album was just for the look of it. The album comes in a slip sleeve cover and the discs are located inside a DVD case box. The case and the photobook slide into the slip sleeve cover. Here's a look at the front and back of the covers (the sleeve and case have the same covers).
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| Back and Front of the case/sleeve cover. |
Inside the case, there's a cool psychedelic design on the interior and on the CD and DVD's. The lyrics booklet is tucked in here and features all the songs lyrics and some photos of the group. The case is sturdy and none of the discs fall out during transport. Probably one of the best DVD cases I've ever gotten (had way too many cases with loose discs over the years).
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| Interior of the case |
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| Some photos of the group can be found in the lyrics booklet. |
The First Press Limited Edition of Dress To Kill comes with a photocard. I've never been too interested in collecting photocards as they're random and you never get the one you want. But this time I was incredibly lucky and got my favourite member, Lizzy! Who knows how this happened but I'm not going to question it.
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| How on earth did I luck out and get Lizzy's card? |
The photobook is quite nice and continues with the whole black and white mod theme of the design of the album. The photobook is 32 pages and features individual and group photos.
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| Snapshot of the photobook. So pretty! |
Now onto the actual album. I loved After School's first Japanese album Playgirlz and all their other albums, so I was looking forward to getting Dress To Kill. The album has a dance feel to it and a slight house sound to some of the tracks. I already had the Heaven single album so I was familiar with two of the tracks on this album. The main part I love about this album is that you can listen to it the whole way through and you can hear the unique sound of the album in all the tracks. There's not that many full albums I can listen to every track in a row but this is one of those. My top track on the album is Ms.Independent which I've loved since the first time I heard it. I was sad it wasn't included as a live track on the DVD as it's my favourite song. The first time I heard Shh, I wasn't too sure what to think but once I heard the instrumental (which is from the single album) I fell in love with the song. I also enjoy Rock It mainly because of the instrumental as well. I'm hoping to get the Shh single soon just for the instrumentals.
The tracks featured on Dress To Kill include:
01. Dress code ~Theme of "Dress to kill"~
02. Dress to kill
03. Ms.Independent
04. Triangle
05. Crazy Driver
06. Shh
07. Yes No Yes
08. Heaven
09. in the moonlight
10. rock it!
11. Spotlight
12. Killing eyes ~End of "Dress to kill"~
Next is the DVD. The DVD features the music videos for Heaven and Shh plus the dance version of Shh. Behind the scenes footage of the jacket filming and other stuff is included on the DVD. The rest of the DVD is footage from After School's 2013 Japan fanmeet. It has a bunch of clips of the girls talking, some being the Orange Caramel sub-unit, and live performances of the following songs: Diva, Flashback, Heaven, Crazy Driver and Slow Love. I quite enjoyed the live performances as they were energetic and entertaining. Plus they were filmed incredibly well. I've brought some Japanese albums with live DVD's and the footage is awful and you cannot see much. Props to whoever filmed the performance and it made the DVD worth buying. The DVD is region 3 so you need a region free or multi-region DVD player to play it.
Overall, I'm incredibly happy with the album and all the extras. The songs of the album are great and it really makes me miss After School because their company hasn't got them to release anything for years. And I won't even talk about Orange Caramel (who are one of my main k-pop groups) who I miss so much. So onto how I brought the album. I'd been looking at getting the album for years but it was always just too expensive (as most japanese albums are). I normally buy all my Japanese albums from Amazon Japan which is where I've brought other After School Japanese single albums before, but shipping is always so expensive for CD's. And then theres YesAsia who I've used a lot in the past mainly for k-pop albums, but this edition is like $82AUD on there! So recently, I've started looking on ebay for albums and came across a seller who just happened to be selling this edition for about $30AUD. I couldn't believe it as that's a huge saving. I ended up buying this and AOA's Angel's Knock album as well.
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| The Dress To Kill album plus the CD-Only version of Heaven |
If you are interested in getting the Dress To Kill album, there's a few methods you can use to get hold of a copy. YesAsia has both the Normal and Limited Edition still listed for sale and it's quite a good site. You get free international shipping over $39USD and they have a wide range of items to buy. Amazon Japan has both editions as well but you need to check if the item will ship to your address as I find items that are listed from a seller other than Amazon Japan never ship to where I live. Amazon Japan does have the best shipping ever (2 days to get to Australia and safest packing ever) however it doesn't come cheap. The Mu-Mo Edition is hard to get hold of and I believe you'd have to try auction sites in Japan for it. Other Japanese online stores like CDJapan and Tower Records have it, but I've never brought directly from these so I can't comment on them. Or you could just buy it off iTunes if you like the whole digital thing. It's currently priced for $24.99 on the Australian store which was kinda pointless to buy for me because for a bit more I could get the physical edition plus you only get the standard 12-track edition of the album on itunes.
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