Tracklist

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Review: Seirei no Moribito, which came out in 2007, has always struck me as an under-appreciated series. It’s got beautiful art, an engaging story, interesting characters and, of course, a gorgeous soundtrack. Composer Kenji Kawai’s resume is long and varied and he brings his A game to this series. It stands out as one of my favourite soundtracks and fits the series extremely well.

The plot of the series centres around Balsa, the spear-wielder, who is tasked with protecting the young Prince Chagum from his own father’s assassins. The emperor fears that Chagum is somehow connected to a spirit that will bring a great drought upon the land and must be killed. Balsa promises to protect him as she seeks to understand what the spirit within Chagum really is using ancient knowledge and folklore.

The folk aspect is a key element in the series, with conflict arising through the different approaches of the traditional, indigenous peoples and the empire guided by the star diviners. As Balsa wanders into this part of the world, Kawai immediately establishes the folk style of the soundtrack by introducing the series’ main theme in “Omoi Haruka”. It’s a soft flowing melody led by the strings and flute with subtle percussion in the background that brings out a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere.

Omoi Haruka

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Several other tracks on the soundtrack echo this style, but each is unique and adds an element of hope or uncertainty to the melodies to allow them to fit extremely well with the cultural landscape of the Seirei no Moribito world. In fact, at least a dozen of the 28 tracks are in this general style. Another great example is the relaxing “Kizuna” which allows the melody to be carried upon a soft flute’s lines, conjuring up images of a calm summer afternoon.

Kizuna

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

As the characters get closer to their grim, mystical fate, the music follows suit, descending into a foreboding, eerie atmosphere, peppered with quick, repeating patterns of 16th notes in the violin and anchored by an almost wailing soprano like the one featured in “Miezaru Kyoui”. There, Kawai opts for a three beat rhythm to add intensity and make the piece feel unnatural, reflecting the story’s supernatural elements. This contrasts with “Jujutsu Shi no Kaikai”, the music of the shamans, which mirrors the almost wailing vocals, but this time the vocals center on a deep baritone voice which moves at a much slower pace. Only the heavy, steady drum beats provide accompaniment, creating a sense of deep thought or meditation.

Miezaru Kyoui

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Jujutsu Shi no Haikai

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

And if Balsa’s struggle to find the answers to her many questions about the mysterious spirit isn’t enough, she and Chagum must contend with the Emperor’s assassins. For these sequences, Kawai provides us with a selection of more intense pieces to reflect the rising tension. These tracks convey the urgency of the situation and instil a sense of the importance of the battle being fought. A strong drum beat leads the way in “Eiyuu, Tatsu”, with a quick-paced violin building the main melody. The choral backing makes it all feel more epic, but it never steals the spotlight of the piece from the melody. Although, this particular track unfortunately didn’t see much use in the actual series, it is still a good listen.

Eiyuu, Tatsu

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

When the threat is imminent, the music kicks it up another notch, yielding “Balsa Hashiru”. This theme builds on the intense drum-beat and urgent violins from the other tracks and combines them into a piece that doesn’t mess around. There’s no choral backing here; it’s just a powerful theme that reflects Balsa herself – strong yet graceful.

Balsa Hashiru

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The soundtrack caps off with a vocal version of the series’ main theme, which carries with it a sense of hope and continuance, led once again by the violin and flute combination of the leading track. The chorus also works it’s magic here, with a delivery strong enough to carry the melody without sounding too artificial. I could have easily been fooled into thinking this was a traditional Japanese folk song, which illustrates the excellence of Kawai’s work.

Overall the soundtrack for Seirei no Moribito provides exactly the right atmosphere to reflect the mystical and cultural elements in the story. Most of the tracks, even the battle music, remain very melodic, though there are a few tracks that simply serve to create an atmosphere and are not as interesting to listen to on their own. The “wailing” songs can also be a bit jarring when not heard in the right context. Nevertheless, this is a solid soundtrack that I will often put on as background music. The folk style themes are a pleasure to listen to and stand well on their own. The fact that they remind me of an awesome anime series is just a bonus.

Rating: Very Good

The responses I got were pretty overwhelming and encompassed over 90 (!!!!!!!) composers (if you can believe that). Speaking as someone who can name maybe half that number, this was a pretty staggering amount and suggests that there may be more anime music fans amongst the fanbase than I’ve seen so far and that most are just kind of dormant. Anyhow, you’ll want to know how things will look over the next 15 months (yes, we do intend to cover 15 anime composers), so check out the list after the jump!

I also plan to run through the methodology and maybe do some comparisons between the sites where I put up the request. That boring quantitative stuff I’ve thrown on page 2, so if you’re really interested how things unfolded, you can look there. As for the general list and the number of points they received from voters in parenthesis:

1. Yuki Kajiura (547 points)
2. Yoko Kanno (499 points)
3. Joe Hisaishi (383 points)
4. Taku Iwasaki (295 points)
5. Kenji Kawai (233 points)
6. Jun Maeda (214 points)
7. Susumu Hirasawa (127 points)
8. Shiro Sagisu (124 points)
9. Tenmon (120 points)
10. Kou Otani (118 points)
11. Toshihiko Sahashi (114 points)
12. Yoshihisa Hirano (111 points)
13. Yasuharu Takanashi (103 points)
14. Michiru Ooshima (101 points)
15. Kotaro Nakagawa (83 points)

Names that barely missed the cut include: Naoki Sato, Kouhei Tanaka, Masumi Itou (Hikaru Nanase), and Mina Kubota.

How This Will Work
Each month, we’ll be highlighting a composer and place a bit more emphasis on reviewing their albums. In fact, we’ll try to toss out somewhere around 3-4 reviews specific to that composer each month. Before we even do that though, we’ll start off with a general profile where we highlight any important biographical tidbits, the sort of stuff you’d find on Wikipedia for instance, but that will make up a small portion of the profile. The bigger portion is in analyzing just how far we feel they’ve progressed as an artist and analyzing the consistency of their works.

So while last year’s big post series revolved around looking at anime soundtracks from 2000-2009, this year’s series looks to be just as ambitious. Maybe even more so. Do look forwards to it and hopefully you can gain some newfound appreciation for the composers you’re familiar with or find a new composer to check out.

For those with a lot of time on their hands, check out page 2 if you want a peek at the methodology as well as a site-by-site breakdown.

I’ve been fairly busy lately with three reviews on my plate: two soundtracks for this blog and a single for OriginalSoundVersion where I’ve pretty much settled in as their J-pop reviewer even if I prioritize on anime-related songs. Combine all of that with the workload from my day job, and that doesn’t leave me with a huge chunk of time.

Anyways, that was me trying to say that despite the catchy title, this isn’t going to be a regular column or anything. There are a couple things that caught my attention last week, and I just thought that I’d combine them all here for the sake of convenience. Take a look after the jump.

One thing that I do want to promote is Peter Shillito’s radio show for The Cat, which records out of Crewe and Nantwich in the UK. His show, titled “Neko Desu,” focuses on anime music, mostly OP/ED stuff rather than BGM, but it promises to be an hour long and should have some interesting songs for people to check out. I found out about this through his twitter request for music and I think one of my suggestions got picked. Which one it is, I don’t know, but I’ll certainly look forward to finding out. After all, a man who likes Hidamari Sketch and anime music can’t be all bad.

The inaugural broadcast starts at 10 PM this Wednesday GMT which you can tune in here. So for folks living in the West Coast of the US, that would be 2 PM local time.

Jeriaska over at GameSetWatch posted an interview he had conducted with composer Kenji Kawai. Kawai’s background should be pretty well known to anime fans since he scored the soundtrack to shows such as Seirei no Moribito and Eden of the East and this interview focuses on his game compositions and film scores moreso than the works that he’s produced for TV series.

Much of the information given here isn’t really all too new. One question that I did find interesting was when Jeriaska asked:

Question: There is a haunting female chorus that appears in the intro of both Ghost in the Shell films. Was there a particular motivation behind finding this sound that so many viewers associate with the films?

Answer: At first the director had requested primitive drum sounds. I felt it would be even more effective if there were a chorus on top of it, something in a Bulgarian style. There are folk singers with very distinctive voices in Japan, and that’s who we found for the vocal roles.

It turned out to be quite different from my original concept of a Bulgarian style. This vocal section was extremely challenging to get right because Japanese folk songs traditionally do not have a chorus. They aren’t set to these particular rhythms, either.

Directly after the movie was released I noticed no one mentioned the music. That made me a little worried. Now that I think about it, I guess no one could critique it because it was such an unusual kind of music that no one had ever heard before. Innocence was basically a direct continuation of Ghost in the Shell, so I retained almost the exact same style.

Piece in question can be heard here.

First off, it gives a bit of an insight into the music composition process for anime series for those of you who aren’t aware of how the it all works. The other thing is that it’s indicative of Kawai’s ability to bring out the haunting atmosphere really well through the use of the chorus in general. I’m not a huge fan of his by a long shot, but the music he composed for Fate/Stay Night had a pretty good mixture of creepy and tragedy floating about and I feel that he’s at his best when he’s channeling that heavy atmosphere (it didn’t work in the case of Higurashi however).

Finally, if you wanted to know about the inner workings of the Japanese music industry with all its warts and corruption schemes, you can check out the interview that Tokyo Damage Report conducted with SATOH-SAN, a former Visual Kei record executive. While a lot of this is more on what visual-kei bands go through, it wouldn’t surprise me if a significant chunk of this applied to J-pop either, like that line about how the labels focus more on image than the actual musical content. That might explain why so many terrible artists are still given the opportunity to torment us with their singing, but I guess my niche would be dissolved if all the music that gets released were all good.

My second favorite part deals with the fans and the urgent need for all fans to be taken in by the fantasy that visual-kei bands have created for themselves so that they will attend the band’s concerts. Even better is how far aggressive fans will go in order to gain the status of the #1 fan of a given band. Fisticuffs aren’t unknown and their other activities described in the interview feel like something sports hooligans would do.

In other words, the antics in Detroit Metal City are funny, but its depiction might be frighteningly accurate.

Hat tip goes out to JPMeyer for that last article via GRSI.

Track List:

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Review: I swear that someone at Sunrise told Kawai Kenji to make the music so recognizable that if any random track were to be played everyone who has ever watched Gundam 00 should know where it came from. With few exceptions, this OST falls in line with the first soundtrack, flaws and all. Each track ranges from decent to excellent, but the overall OST is hard to bear in one sitting due to the sheer amount of repetition and numerous similarities across the tracks.

I am quite thankful that the best piece is the first one on the disk since it saves me the trouble of searching through the clutter.  Full of sorrow and majesty, “Imperial Princess” is the song that will keep you coming back for more.

Imperial Princess [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

There really is not a single track here that is particularly bad, but the vast majority of songs feel like above average stock music that provides some nice music to paint scenes but are otherwise dull.  You need to jump to near the end of the OST to “Counterattack” before things really get mixed up.

Counterattack [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

For a music editor, it is actually quite nice to have a large number of different songs that ultimately converge to the same style.  This allows the music to become strongly associated with a particular show, and it allows the central theme song to be played over and over again, with just enough variation to feel both fresh and familiar each episode.  The problem is that it makes for a poor listening experience unless adequately spaced out over a long period of time.  As a result, stuff like “Forward” would have gotten a stronger reaction with me if it wasn’t yet another throwback to the main theme.

Forward [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Also, one begins to wonder if Kawai Kenji really had to remix virtually  every tune in the series.  For instance, did you enjoy “Setsuna” from the first OST?

Setsuna (Gundam 00 OST 1)[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

How about supplementing it with the flute version?

Sorrow [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The piano version?

Love Song [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Or strings for good measure?

Separation [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

I finally understand how Gundam 00 managed to get away with playing the same theme music three times every single episodes: the creators had around 50 million iterations of it. I can honestly say that I’ll never be able to forget some of songs but I don’t know whether it is out of love of the material or a cause of repetition that has jackhammered the tunes into my head.

Considering that any one of the numerous remixes of “Setsuna” left a greater impression on me than many of the other songs, I wonder why the others couldn’t have been just as good.

Rating: Decent

Track List:

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Review: Over the years, the Gundam series has been associated with good music. Yoko Kanno’s epic Turn a Gundam OST and Toshihiko Sahashi’s 8-disc Gundam SEED OST had excellent main themes, displayed life and variety, and were highly enjoyable. Therefore, it is not surprising that fans of the franchise will have high expectations of Gundam 00′s soundtrack if they were to use Kanno’s and Sahashi’s works as benchmarks.

However, Gundam 00 is one that curious soundtrack fans should pass up on because it’s just so bland and repetitive. The individual tracks are not terrible on their own, but when put together with over 20 tracks which have roughly the same atmosphere and style, it is enough to bore anyone. The big problem with this soundtrack is that there isn’t a notable climax; everything proceeds at the same speed and volume, creating a hypnotic effect.

The grandeur that we usually associate with Gundam music is completely lacking here. The only track which comes slightly close is “Control,” which, when compared to tracks like “Kantai Shiki” from Gundam SEED DESTINY Soundtrack 2, sounds vastly inferior.

Control
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Kantai Shiki (Gundam SEED Destiny)
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The choice of instrumental, though promising at first, becomes awfully predictable and limited as the soundtrack drags on. I enjoyed the drums and choir during “Alarm Bell,” but hearing it reused wholesale in “Intervention,” “Power,” “Beating,” and “League” is just too much.

Alarm Bell
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Beating
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Those trying really hard to find just the tiniest bit of variety may notice slight variations in instrumentals in tracks such as “Innovation.” However, picking out such tracks requires great concentration, which is unbelievably difficult when it comes to this soundtrack. Plus, it is not really worth taxing your ears so much just to hear such variations, which the majority of others soundtracks easily deliver.

Of the tracks on this album, “Setsuna” leaves a decent impression because its Arabic style does not follow the same structure as the others, making it a somewhat effective wake-up call. Even so, the track lacks development as the melody becomes overly repetitive. Other notable tracks include “Crisis,” “Administration” and “Eyes,” but it doesn’t change the fact that 4 decent tracks out of 22 is a meager amount.

Setsuna
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The only track that registers a change mood is “Daily,” going from the monotonous drones to something rather lively. However, even this is not without its flaws. Kawai Kenji just seems to be trying too hard, resulting in a track that wouldn’t be out of place in K-ON’s OST but juts out like a sore thumb here.

Daily
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Even for those who’ve watched the anime and were fairly impressed with the music, I’d still say you should just leave it at that. Whatever was memorable in the anime turns out to have at least three other variations in the soundtrack. Whatever was not memorable in the anime has hardly any value, since it holds no depth even upon careful listening.

To all but the most dedicated and patient of Gundam 00 fans, this soundtrack falls far short of what we expect from Gundam soundtracks, or any anime soundtrack for that matter. Personally, I’ve seldom had much difficulty finishing a soundtrack, but Gundam 00 really tested my patience from start to finish.

Rating: Not Good