Anime info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album
Credits
BGM: Kuniaki Haishima
Theme songs: en avant
Info
So we had a film (Spriggan), and we had a full season TV series (Blue Gender), and now we’ve got a four-episode direct-to-video anime series. This is another sci-fi action series, apparently one of those where there’s cute character design and art but then it takes a horrible psychological and violent turn. So I assume that’s how Kuniaki Haishima got attached to it, despite the key art of schoolgirls in rollerskates seeming a bit incongruous with his musical style.
Though a lot of the soundtrack is in fact pretty cutesy, befitting schoolgirls in rollerskates. This is by far the most straightforwardly melodic work so far, with a number of tracks getting downright quirky or silly. There are plenty of toy instruments or otherwise acoustic instrumentation; while there are some electronic tracks, including one with breakbeats(!!), they’re in the minority, and synths are usually just used as additional texture for the acoustic instrumentation.
The music isn’t any more facile than his more serious-sounding music, though, far from it! It’s definitely the most outwardly normal soundtrack I’ve listened to, with only an occasional moment that makes me go “what the fuck” (which is still more than a lot of soundtracks have), but there’s still a decent amount of big chords, random weird tonalities (an easy way to make music sound quirky!), and interesting sound design, all of which are stuff Haishima has been deploying elsewhere. A new thing here is that a lot of tracks feature some rhythmic stacking, in a couple of cases dipping into straight up minimalistic rhythmic layering, so there’s another box in the “CHz bait” checklist Haishima has found a way to check off.
So I thought this was a fun soundtrack! It’s not “objectively insane,” but I think you can pretty easily tell it’s a weird guy trying to write cute music, and I feel like that’s a good vibe.
The opening and ending themes were handled by songwriting unit en avant. The opening theme is a pretty standard pop song performed by the voice cast as their characters and I didn’t find it particularly interesting in any way, but the ending theme is a ballad which was also performed by en avant (one of its members is a singer, Hitomi Tsuburaya) and I didn’t think it was half bad. For the most part it’s not really a super daring piece of music either, but the sound palette is a pleasantly disparate mix of Mellotron flute, later synthesizers, wah and distorted guitar, and reverbed up piano licks, and a couple of the background melodic lines get randomly spicy.
That’ll do it for the Haishima posting for now. I’ll definitely be listening to more of his stuff in the future, because as it turns out he rules, but I think I’m due for a spot of panic binging the game soundtracks from this year that are piling up as they always do.
Recommended tracks:
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“Gentle Drill” is a warm and inviting intro track for the soundtrack, though that random synth swoop at 1:17 has a little bit of an edge to it
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“Opened Hole” tries to sound menacing and fails utterly at that task, even before the kazoo shows up
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“Hot Color” is one of the more overtly minimalist tracks; the background acoustic guitar figure that starts the track is polymetric with the rest of the music (it’s only 15 beats), which is fun
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“True Schedule” sounds like some of the techno that was in Blue Gender, though obviously the melody sets it apart
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“Cry These” is the track with breakbeats, because of course I’m going to post the track with breakbeats, let’s not kid ourselves here
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“Let’s Pray” is some goofy toy instrument nonsense
(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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