7 minute read
VINYL FRONTIERS
by Shelley Pallis
The first volume of Hiroyuki Sawano’s award-winning soundtrack to the anime series Attack on Titan is now out on vinyl, for all those of you who want the retro feel and an excuse to have an even bigger version of that cover art, and another chance to hear the tunes that launched a thousand Scouts.
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In interviews, Sawano has offered a frankly bland account of his inspirations, citing Chage & Aska, and then Tetsuya Komuro as his early inspirations. He points, later in his career, to Joe Hisaishi, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yoko Kanno as specific inspirations that led him into working in soundtracks, and certainly one gets a sense in this first album of the influence particularly of Kanno, in his epic orchestrations and odd augmentations. But it’s his use of brass, in particular, that really comes out in the Attack on Titan soundtrack – Sawano appears to have found a way to really push the sheer scale of the Titans into the soundscape by throwing in more brass, more brass, more brass, until your stereo is shaking like a belligerent, never-ending fanfare, heralding the end of the world.
Incidental music is often difficult to review – in its most extreme cases, such as much of Kenji Kawai’s soundtrack for Ghost in the Shell, the less memorable portions, when taken out of context, sound like somebody tuning their instruments or randomly smacking drums. Inevitably, Sawano’s score for Attack on Titan stitches together music for fight scenes and chase sequences, clearly intended for use in similarly short bursts. However, he does so with a certain panache, turning each cluster of stings into a stand-alone piece, usually running for three or four minutes. Many of the tracks have odd typographical titles that must be an editorial nightmare – I’m listing them here using plain text, and not including umlauts, unnecessary accents, kanji and in several cases, wing-dings in the titles. The central piece, in its full-length version, throws in everything but the kitchen sink – a choir straight out of Carl Orff (filtered, one suspects, through similar soundtrack efforts by Michael Kamen), rocking guitars, and that’s before Mika Kobayashi wanders in. I’d say there were half a dozen sections that could, and have been excerpted as musical stings – this is a multi-use track that an audio director can plunder to plug a number of holes.
The gentle piano in “Eye-Water” is prodded at by occasional dissonances in the background, as if someone is faffing with their phone at a piano concerto. “Body Motion” thumping menace, big brass for giant enemies and grand gestures, whereas “Counter-Attack Mankind” brings back in the human choir, even more lovely brass and extra strings to provide a musical counterpoint to the Titans. “Army Attack” mixes more ethnic themes, as if a bunch of Bartok-loving experimental violinists from an Irish birthday party have gate-crashed the recording.
Similar whimsy lurks somewhere in the lyrical sound picture of “Vogel im Kafig” and “Bauklotze” although vocalists Cyua and Mika Kobayashi are singing in German, hardly the language of love. This, along with much other Teutonic tastes in the soundtrack, and among the names in the show, has led to much internet speculation about whether Attack on Titan is actually set in some kind of alternate Germany. But looking back over Sawano’s other works, German lyrics and themes show up regularly enough to be a clear interest for the composer, not something Attack on Titan-specific.
And then, of course, there are the songs, including “Reluctant Heroes” sung in English, and a special mention for “DOA” by Aimee Blackschleger, which has English lyrics worthy of a mental Eurovision rock anthem. I can well imagine Estonia, or Iceland, or BosniaHercegovina sending an all-girl leather-clad metal band rocking out earnest exhortations like: “Keep your weapons aimed / Here comes the chilling face / Pushin’ down your fear/ Jump on the necks of the monsters.” Yes, yes, jump on their necks, before they tear your town limb-from-limb. “Where are your mum and dad?” she adds, as if someone really ought to be
supervising all this monster neck-jumping.“Here come the giant hands, breaking through the walls!” Douze points. But that’s not all...!
As Golgo 13 was Japan’s nihilistic answer to both Bond and the master-thieves of many a crime caper, many elements of the score (now also rereleased on vinyl through Tiger Labs) echo the kind of 1970s action movies that would surely have been on the mind of the film’s producers. It’s baffling, in fact, listening to the often-jazzy sounds from Toshiyuki Kimori’s soundtrack, why Golgo 13 wasn’t a prime candidate for the sort of complete soundtrack replacement that Manga Entertainment did on the likes of Cyber City Oedo 808. A movie that, if made today would have been all Hans Zimmer brass, and if made twenty years ago, would have surely been all metal, all the time, comes across very much as a piece of its time, with a jazz-fusion nostalgia ideally suited to the kind of bespoke vinyl we’ve come to expect from Tiger Lab. “Gold and Silver” mixes quiet, slow jazz with sudden bursts of jeopardy, in order to accompany the film’s account of the two eponymous mercenaries.
Incidental pieces like “Tail to Nose” and “Danger Zone” flirt with the verve of Lalo Schifrin’s work on Mission: Impossible, but
constantly slip back into jazz, as if the band would rather be playing a dance than the background to a series of brutal murders.
Composer (and in some cases on the album, arranger of others’ tunes) Toshiyuki Kimori (1947-1988) studied at the Dick Grove School of Music, other alumni of which have included Michael Jackson and Barry Manilow, and where faculty teachers had, at various times, included Henry Mancini and the aforementioned Schifrin. Back in Japan, Kimori became something of a 1980s hit factory, both under his own name, and under the monicker “Keith Morrison”, in which guise he produced the Japanese soundtracks for Jackie Chan’s Wheels on Meals and the 1982 Shaolin Temple movie. His anime contributions included Dirty Pair and My Youth in Arcadia, but these seem to be relatively minor entries in a crazy career that included producing Japanese records for little Jimmy Osmond, and writing a tune that went on the soundtrack of Raise the Titanic, at least in Japan and Spain.
Vocalist “Cindy Wood”, who sings the three songs on the soundtrack, has her own fascinating back-story that fades from public around the time of the 1983 Golgo 13 movie. She is better known internationally as Cynthia Wood, the
Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1974, who briefly parleyed her photoset into several bit parts in the movies, including parading around in a blue cowboy hat as as one of the three Playboy Bunnies who dance for the troops in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Before her Playboy appearance catapulted her to minor celebrity, Wood had been a music major at college. Which, somehow, led to the bizarre sight and sound of her suddenly turning up on Japanese TV belting out songs in English and Japanese. There is, to be sure, a story lurking behind such a crazy career path, although in the years since, Wood became a casting agent and a doctor in psychology.
“Pray for You”, the opening song on the album, as it was on the movie, features Wood singing largely in Japanese, with lyrics that prefigure the film’s closing scene, as well as encapsulating the murderous intentions of a woman scorned. It’s hence all the more surprising that “Pray for You” is the big opener, because if anything feels like a Bond title sequence in the making, it’s the later “Golgo 13 and I”, in which Wood demands in English that the listener “Kill me! Kill me once again!” and then immediately softens her message in Japanese, demanding to be embraced once more, although only a Japanese-speaking listener would know that! Unfortunately, a combination of clunky lyrics and indistinct diction has meant that, to my cloth ears at least, Wood’s constant trilling about “Love’s Mystery” sounds more like someone proclaiming her passionate desire for “Mr Bean”, which is probably not what the composers had in mind. The album closes with a rather sweet piano reprise of “Love’s Mystery”, in which the absence of any lyrics allows the original tune to shine through.
