Last week I received a huge parcel from YesAsia: my Tommy boxsets!

Strawberry Cream Soda Pop and Gothic Melting Ice Cream. ドちらがいい？

I’ve been a huge fan of Tommy ever since Lonely in Gorgeous was used as the OP for the Paradise Kiss anime. Around the same time I fell for a song called Sayonara Summer is Over by a band called the Brilliant Green. Little did I know Tomoko Kawase was the voice behind both.

Here’s Lonely in Gorgeous.

So, Tommy just released two best of albums, one for the disco-pop Tommy February6 and one for the goth-rock-pop Tommy Heavenly6 (though surprisingly not on 6 February, Tomoko’s birthday). Both boast a hell of an album title: Strawberry Cream’s Soda Pop Daydream and Gothic Melting Ice Cream’s Darkness Nightmare.

Being a sucker for Japanese merchandise gimmicks, I ordered the deluxe boxset blu-spec CD and DVD versions of both.

The box sets are a mirror image of each other: one goth and one pop depending on your taste (I love both, but definitely swing more toward pop Tommy ^^). The goodies include: the best of album featuring a couple of new bonus tracks (like Unlimited Sky, the recent Gundam 00 insert song), the DVD with all the singles’ music videos, a set of clear plastic sleeves with the single covers printed on them, a school-themed photobook, a sheet of stickers and the standard booklet of lyrics and credits. Best of all is a lovely ring binder with a metal embossed plate, in keeping with the whole high-school student theme. And there’s a big box to put everything in.

God knows what I’m actually going to do with all this stuff (keep it in the box on a shelf NRFB no doubt ^^;) but it’s nice to have and a must for any Tomoko Kawase fan.

The albums themselves are great. As a best of, it’s obviously all been heard before but it’s great to hear all the singles in a big long playlist (even the full ten minute Hallowe’en weirdo version of Lollipop Candy Bad Girl).

Gallery after the jump.

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