メカクシティデイズ／Mekaku City Days by じん aka 自然の敵P (Shinzen no Teki-P)

         Overview

             

          Well, here we go! This album is the first full album of the star-studded Kagero Project, or Kagepro as some call it. This album's story has spawned just about every type of merch including novels, manga, fanart, fanfic, and more. An anime adaptation has been announced by SHAFT, which should prove to be quite awesome if it's done well.

          I'll try to give a brief summary of what it's all about before I get into the music. Mekaku City Days tells the story of a group of teenagers (life ends after high school in Japan, so there's no other possible setting) who have mysterious eye powers with various abilities. The one uniting characteristic that they share is that their eyes are red, which marks them as eye power users. The songs on the album generally tell the story of each character and how they came to get their powers. It's quite interesting, but you have to really delve into the manga/novels/wiki summaries to get the full picture.

          As for the album itself, it comes in a really nice little box that contains the CD as well as some extra goodies. The CD itself is actually a pair of CDs: one disc contains the music, and the other is a DVD which contains PVs of a few of the songs: Kagerou Days, Headphone Actor, Souzou Forest, Konoha's State of the World, and Toumei Answer (You'll get more info on these songs later, don't worry). It also comes packaged with nice little booklets that give you the band score for Kagerou Days as well as Souzou Forest, in a ddition to a little booklet that has the lyrics to all the songs. It's all quite lovely, and the stellar artwork of Shizu and わにゃんぷー adorns pretty much everything. This album definitely gets an A+ for packaging.

But how does the music fare?

1) ロスタイムプロローグ/Lost Time Prologue: This is a cool little spoken word prologue that introduces us to the album. It uses some nice reverberant noises behind the vocals to create a sense of dread before topping abruptly and having the vocals lead us into the last song. I'm pretty sure the vocals are done by Kana Asumi, who you might know as the actress of Strength from the Black Rock Shooter anime(s). It's a nice way to start things off. I'm not 100% sure what she's saying, but I do know that she's supposed to be Takane Ene, and A.I. character in the Kagepro series. Check out the translation here.

2) カゲロウデイズ/Kagerou Days: Here it is, the big ol' granddaddy of the project. This song's skyrocketed into Vocaloid legend already, having easily surpassed 3,000,000 views on Niconico. Interestingly, わにゃんぷー made the first PV that everyone came to know; it was a fanmade PV with no official support (check it out here). Soon after, as the song started to reach its massive popularity, Jin put out an official PV of the song, and thanked わにゃんぷー for his support. The song features Jin doing what he does best - playing guitar. Jin's stellar guitar work coupled with some great synth work make the song especially memorable. This song is unique on this album due to its use of Miku; the rest of the songs use IA, as this album was commissioned as part of the IA Project to promote her. Jin's tuning of Miku here is a controversial thing: his Miku is very high-pitched and shrill. I remember playing around in the Vocaloid program and transposing Miku's voice and octave lower;  I liked it better that way. This high-pitched tuning is very common in Jin's stuff, and it tends to draw sharp lines over who likes it and who hates it. Honestly, I'm not a huge fan, though I can tolerate it. Jin's songwriting itself is superb, with all the instruments being very interesting and well mixed. Miku's vocals just get shrill.

3) ヘッドフォンアクター/Headphone Actor: Another popular song and the current focus of the manga, Headphone Actor is the story of how Takane Enomoto, a regular human girl, was forced into an A.I. body and reborn as Ene. The PV is quite lovely, and tells a cool tale. As I mentioned before, Jin's tuning is generally quite shrill, especially with IA. This shows through in Headphone Actor, as IA's voice reaches incredibly high pitches that might make your ears crawl if you're not used to Japanese music. The instrumentation is, again, awesome, with ゆーまお's drums and the bass guitar sticking out especially.

4) 想像フォレスト/Souzou Forest: This is another very popular song from the series, with another very popular PV. It's about a 1/4 Medusa girl named Mary who has shut herself away in the woods. It's very cute, and features a much more mildly-tuned IA. The synth and drums are the most prominent parts of the track, with the guitar and bass being present but secondary. Souzou Forest is one of the best songs on the album, as it's got a nice groove with cute-yet-not-harsh vocals. The synth breakdown in the middle gets extra points.

5) エネの電脳紀行/Ene no Dennou Kikou: This song picks up right where Headphone Actor left off; it's about when Takane first awakens  in her new A.I. body as Ene. The synth and guitar dominate this song, and they're really cool. IA's tuning here is a strange middle ground between her overly high and harsh tuning and her soft ballad voice. It's not awful - there are worse in the album - but it comes out a little too robotic for my taste. The song's still fun though, despite some misgivings about IA's tuning. There are some really cool effects with the synth that you can pick up with good headphones.

6) デッドアンドシーク/Dead and Seek: Not much is really known yet about exactly what this song is about. Judging by the lyrics and my knowledge of the series, I would guess it's about people getting their eye powers and being spit back out into the normal world to entertain Dark Konoha (see the sound "Outer Science" for an idea of what that's like. It's on Mekaku City Records, which I'll be reviewing next. Spoiler!) Regardless, it's a synth-based song with a decent backing track. It's not one of my favorites; IA's voice is VERY robotic here, even moreso than the last song. That may be Jin's objective, which is fine and all, but it just doesn't make for all that pleasant of a listen. The instrumental track is acceptable but altogether forgettable, and blends a bit too much with tracks 5 and 7, which make it almost tough to tell when the songs switch if you're not paying attention. It doesn't help that it's short.

7) 人造エネミー/Jinzou Enemy: This is actually the first song in the series; it's about Ene watching over her master, Shintaro, and trying to convince him that being a NEET is not the answer to his troubles. The song is almost at 1,000,000 views, and it'll probably get there soon enough. Like the previous two songs, the synth is very strong here. It's sung by Miku again (I'm surprised they allowed more than one non-IA track on an IA Project CD), and her voice is as high and shrill as we've come to expect from Jin. It's by no means an awful song, but it suffers from Dead and Seek's syndrome of sounding emotionally stale and forgettable, a shame considering its cool message.

8) 透明アンサー/Toumei Answer: Finally, a break from the synth! Toumei Answer is a pretty sad song actually; it's about how Shintaro's friend Ayano commits suicide for an unknown reason by jumping off the school roof, which does such emotional damage to Shintaro that he becomes a NEET (and later, Ene's master). It's a gorgeous little tune, with high-but-gentle tuning of IA, and an absolutely wonderful guitar track that makes great use of the delay pedal. The drums are groovy but not overpowering. It's a pretty little ballad, and definitely one of the high points of the album.

9) 如月アテンション/Kisaragi Attention: One of the most popular songs on the album, Kisaragi Attention is a cute little number about Momo, a girl with the eye ability to make others look at her, aka draw attention to herself. She becomes and idol and rises to stardom, but she quickly comes to dislike the fame and the inability to go outside without drawing in crowds. She meets Kido, whose eye ability can cloak her. Momo joins the Mekakushi-dan in the end. The guitar and drums stand out, but the bass line is pretty nice as well. IA's tuned very well in the songs; her voice has just the right amount of wetness coupled with a high pitch to sound cute but not annoying. The guitar solo is also damn cool in this one. The PV is quite cute too, which contributed to its popularity. A great song to cheer us up after Toumei Answer.

10) メカクシコード/Mekakushi Code: This song is about Kido, the leader of the Mekakushi-dan who has an eye ability which can cloak the user and make others around her practically invisible. It features a very grungy and fuzzy synth at the forefront with the guitar chiming in on occasion. We surprisingly hear Miku again, and her voice is a bit robotic, though not as high as Kagerou Days (thankfully). The background music isn't very strong, though it serves very well as just that; it backs up the vocals very well without calling too much attention to itself. All in all it's a very well-written song, but Miku's vocals are a bit bland and take away from the song's replay value.

11) コノハの世界事情/Konoha's State of the World: One of the darker stories in the project, even for Jin. This song is about Konoha, another strange A.I./android type character (it's unclear what his deal is yet) who is forced to watch the unfortunate events of Kagerou Days unfold over and over again. He wants to do something about it, but he is powerless to stop it, though a glimmer of hope appears to him in the end. The song is sung by Miku and IA together, and is the only duet on the album. The guitar in particular is awesome in this song, and credit for it goes to Nakanishi, an awesome guitarist whose work appears in a lot of Vocaloid stuff. The song draws you in, gets you excited for the climax, and explodes into an awesome finale. It's incredibly well written, and there have been a ton of great covers of it. Ultimately, I like some human singers better than the Vocaloid duet of the original, but it's still very good. Check out the PV here.

12) シニガミレコード/Shinigami Record: A gentler piano piece to wind us down as we approach the end of the album, this is a sweet IA ballad to treat out ears nicely. It tells the story of Azami, a Medusa who is the grandmother of Mary. She lives alone in the woods and detests humans, but one day a man meets her and, over time, they fall in love and start a family. She realizes, however, that he will age and die long before her, which saddens her deeply. She uses her power to create a never ending world where her family can live with her, but fails to do so before her husband dies. She goes into her own world, along. It's quite tragic, but also very beautiful. The gentle piano works very well for this song, and it's quite cathartic to listen to.

13) カイエンパンザマスト/Kaien Panzermast: This is the outro of the album, and is a spoken word section much like Lost Time Prologue. It's about carrying out some sort of plan and meeting someone (check the translations out). I'm not sure who the voice is, but I'm pretty sure it's Ene/Kana Asumi again. It's a cool way to end the album.

  Final Thoughts

   Ultimately, Jin suffers from what I like to call "Bob Dylan Syndrome." He's an excellent songwriter and a stunning instrumentalist, but he just can't seem to consistently nail the vocals down well. A few great hits here and there are equally matched by some unfortunate missteps that occur along the way which drag the album down. Ultimately it's worth having for the sake of the extras, the story, and the good songs that are present, but I wouldn't call the album as a whole a masterpiece. It's of acceptable quality, but it's not great.

     6.5/10