Kuroki Meisa is making a physical debut with her album “hellcat“, to be released April 8th. Her previously digital-only single “Like This” will be on it, as well as her new song “Bad Girl” which is used as an insert in the upcoming Crows ZERO II movie. (Why a song about a bad girl is used in a movie where there seemingly are no girls is a question, but let’s ignore that for now…)

I know a lot of people are against the j-pop method of having anyone and everyone famous release music; I’m one of those too. But I’m actually pleasantly surprised at how easily and naturally I took to liking Kuroki Meisa’s first release I loved “Like This“, and was disappointed that her singing career seemed to be a one-song-only deal. But now…

Watch it – you just might be wowed. Despite pulling off some Koda Kumi-level slutty dance moves (the red lingerie scenes felt more like softcore porn than just a “sensual dance”) she manages to look more sultry than crude for most of the video. The black and white triple-image scenes are pretty awesome to watch. Music-wise, she’s definitely embracing Amuro Namie-esque dance tunes as her genre of choice – and she sure picked up some good producers, because the track itself is slamming. Her voice, although obviously altered at parts, sounds a lot better than it did in “Like This” – although whether that’s from her own skills or from clever vocoding is still debatable.

It’s so early that the tracklisting and album covers haven’t yet been released – but with an album name like “hellcat”, I think we can be pretty certain there will be quite a handful of aggressive and sexy tracks included. There will also be at least one other pv recorded for the DVD version of the album. Kuroki Meisa has yet to perform live, which leaves her actual dancing and singing skills to be undetermined, but she has a promising music career in front of her as long as she keeps her current producers and songwriters.

For those in Japan, “Bad Girl” is available for download via cell phone chaku-uta. For the rest of us, if you’re like me at least, you’ll be sitting in anticipation to see what else will be on this album.

Rising actress Kuroki Meisa is the CM girl for Sportio cell phones, and is also debuting as a singer by releasing her debut song “Like This” for the CM. The song and video are only available on digital download.

Kuroki Meisa is drop dead gorgeous, but she’s always struck me as being just a mediocre actress. Meisa fans, don’t flame me yet – I don’t follow her extensively, but from what I’ve seen of her acting and promotional work, she seems like the pretty girl with little presence.  Her expressions often look the same, and she always seems kind of aloof and too cool to be relatable.

But a musical career really uses her cool aloofness and displays it as its best. “Like This” is a hot R&B dance song; though its hard to judge through the song how well Meisa can actually sing, it does suit her with the cool sound it has. Mostly, I’m really liking the composition – from the opening the song and Meisa are aggressive and slick.

Check out her Sportio ad – I think it’s even more fierce than the PV.

I’m always have mixed feelings on actresses and models going into singing – even though they often put out catchy songs, they just can’t sing. (Read: Leah Dizon’s terrible live singing.) Whether Meisa can sing and dance her worth is still up in the air, but at the very least she’s got an extremely catchy, extremely well produced debut song.