Tainaka Sachi

I placed an order at YesAsia for a bunch of stuff. Enough stuff that I was debating whether to add in Tainaka Sachi's latest album, Love is.... If you'll recall, タイナカサチ　burst upon the scene with the OP to Fate/stay Night, "disillusion". Strangely enough, that song was produced in a way that takes the edge, the distinctive cry out of her voice. I guess they were going for a different effect, with the sweeping violin harmonic line and the, uh, soprano solo.

I was much more impressed by the "B-side" to the single, 忘れかけていたのかな (Wasurekaketeita no kana). It's a quiet song that shows the artist's ability to write musically sophisticated songs, and the brilliant vocal ability to pull them off. Curiously, this song hasn't made it into either of her albums, although it's one of my favorites.

Back to Love is.... Itoshii Hito he is a song where she's really got the cry going on. Seriously, her voice gives me chills. The music video is lacking something, though.

Lipstick is a song which I found somewhat too obnoxious at first, but I've warmed up to it. It's nice that there's real brass in this song, though it seems to be multitracked. With regards to the PV, I can attest that it's really hard to groove while playing a trumpet, unless you have extensive marching or ska band experience. I'm also a bit surprised that I can't find a translation for this song online. Makes me want to step up and do it, but my skills are probably far too rudimentary.

Well, anyway, I ended up not ordering the album. Maybe next month, who knows.

キミと夜空と坂道と

This song's been rattling around in my head. "Kimi to Yozora to Sakamichi to", something about You and the Night Sky and the Slope, if I'm parsing that correctly. "Slope" isn't very romantic, of course. Neither is most of Myself; Yourself. Okay, that was a bad segue; I'm still watching it after all. The good part: Nanaka miko banzai. The bad part: unlimited loli works. Okay, I'm stretching again, but to spend two episodes on whatshername offends my sensibilities. I guess you can't create a visual novel for the mainstream without hitting all the major demographics. And there's probably not enough plot to fill out 13 episodes otherwise, even though they've thrown in just about every cliché they could. Well, I take that back, they've got several characters' worth of plot left, probably; Ep 7 implies that there's even a path for Yuzuki-sensei. Admittedly the anime has made me mildly curious about the visual novel. For example, these frames are pretty much instant tsundere gratification.

(Slight change of topic) Looking at ANN, Nanaka's seiyuu, Ami Koshimizu, has done a lot of other roles. This season, she's also in Kimikiss, as Hoshino-san, a role that's close to that of Nanaka. Interestingly, she's also the voice of Tenma in School Rumble, quite a different character. Even more curiously, she's going to be Horo in Wolf and Spice/Spice and Wolf/Spicy Wolf, something of a teasing role. Well, next season should be interesting.

Oh yeah, the song. It's very catchy, particularly the refrain. For awhile I had "ボクらしく，そう，キミらしく，ただ夜空を見める" repeating endlessly in my head. That line pretty much sums up my romantic attachment to this song. Listening to it now, I can identify other catchy aspects. There's that guitar riff after the lead-in, which turns into a chromatic upward cadence -- it's a major rush. I've also started to notice the stunning effectiveness of simple backup voices, whether in harmony, or to add breadth to the melodic line. In this case there's a lot of groovy "whoo-hoo"ing which somehow works extremely well. Man, there's an organ in the mix too. These arrangements never cease to amaze.