Hold your breath
In the sleepless city; ¹
The get-rich-quick Hall
That we creep into— ²
It’s make or break
On the tightrope walk of a Dance floor
What I gamble with is this body of mine
Change into a suit
And let’s impersonate them
The table is a sumptuous feast of a Boad— ³
It’s make or break
On the tightrope walk of a Dance floor
What I gamble with is this body of mine
In the midst of a thrill, everything accelerates ⁴
We’ll gamble the Five card of life
The echo of an instant, falling like sparks
It’s time to forget about the death
On the tightrope walk of a Dance floor
What I gamble with is this body of mine
The stabbing pain
Of our skin on fire—
Is the Stairway of glory we walk
The echo of an instant, falling like sparks
It’s time to forget about the death
.
NOTES / INTERPRETATION:
Blue font indicates text originally written in English in the official booklet.
oo1. Fuyajyou is the name of a castle from the Han Dynasty that ‘never slept’, but now is used to describe a ‘sleepless city’ (or district) in more general terms, and can especially refer to a red-light district. Show mentioned having taken some inspiration from Ocean’s 11 when writing these lyrics, so a place like Las Vegas would certainly fit the bill here.
oo2. There really is very little in the song to suggest whether some of the lines are singular (I) or plural (we), but I chose to make some of them plural because the song references ‘five joker/card’ in the title and lyrics, implying that the action in the song isn’t being undertaken alone, and because of the fact in note oo1.
oo3. ‘Boad’ is either a misspelling of English ‘board’ or the word for ‘wood’ in a conlang, ‘Volapük’. It could also be the acronym of an African bank! Hey, you never know! I imagined the English option though… if that’s wrong, then… someone correct me haha.
oo4. The line literally reads ‘in the midst of a thrill, it accelerates’, but that didn’t flow very well in English, and neither did ‘things accelerate’, so I went with ‘everything’, in order to better capture that feeling you get from an adrenaline rush.
oo5. Though it is not written in the booklet, at the end of the song, Show murmurs Let’s play the game. Similarly, he murmurs something at the beginning as well, and it sounds like ___ planet, but I am really not certain what it is.
.
アリス九號. ★ FIVE JOKER → PLANET NINE (将・2018)
ALICE NINE. – FIVE JOKER | From PLANET NINE (Show – 2018)
Original text translated from Japanese.
Listen on itunes/Spotify.