Next up, a bunch of anime songs in one! (At least a couple of you felt that exclamation mark.)
[Video]
[5.67]
Taylor Alatorre: The first season of Love Live! Sunshine!! might as well be titled Love Live! The Agony of Influence!!. The show goes to such great lengths to stress how indebted the girls of Aqours are to their predecessors in µ’s that at times it resembles a big-budget fanfic. Eventually the group realizes the need to compartmentalize their hero worship and forge a path of their own, setting the stage for a less referential second season (which is still on my to-watch list). If “Water Blue New World” is any indication, the weight of history isn’t something that goes away with a few motivational speeches. The drama, the missteps, the lessons learned and the hard-won successes all find expression here, with key changes that underline the escalating stakes that these girls from a rural seaside town have chosen to take on. As a series wrap-up it serves its purpose, but as a song it feels a bit didactic, like a coronation single from an early season of American Idol. Maybe the writers overcorrected for the slightness of the winning µ’s song, which was anticlimactic enough that they had to re-enact an established classic as an encore. Still, it’s hard to write an actual dud using the patented Love Live! formula. The vocal performances here, neatly grouped by grade level and sub-unit as a way of grounding individual showmanship in the bonds of kinship, are worthy of that sea of glow sticks.
[6]
Katie Gill: A lot of rhythm game songs suffer from the same problem: how do you make a song that’s supposed to be 2ish minutes into a full single? “Water Blue New World” easily conquers that problem. Admittedly, it conquers it by doing more of the same, but it does that so well, building up and changing things around, highlighting different parts of the vocal line so that it sounds different even though it’s more of the same. And that explosion of sound, right at the final “water blue new world”? It’s a perfect climax, one that the song spends so much time building up to.
[8]
Alfred Soto: Not watery enough, I’m afraid. Too sparkly and deformed and at least three minutes too long.
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: A multi-suite song wherein every additional minute makes me 1) celebrate any further musical development whilst 2) bemoaning its increasingly tiring nature. The final climax doesn’t feel like the cumulative result of everything that preceded it, so the payoff isn’t terribly satisfying.
[4]
Iain Mew: I think the ever-escalating hour-plus credit sequence that was Momoiro Clover Z’s 5th Dimension has spoiled me for this kind of thing forever. Faced with vocal commitment ranging from impressive to terrifying, multiple super deluxe guitar solos, and approximately a billion key changes, I find myself asking, is that all you’ve got? Where’s the dubstep opera?
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: It’s definitely just because I’m listening to this with Christmas less than two weeks away, but “Water Blue New World” is like a musical Advent calendar: now here’s a “Sortcelière” guitar chug, now here’s a blatant bite of the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman,” now here’s a held curtain-call note, now here’s one guitar solo, one key change, then another and another and another. After the first week it starts repeating candies, but who complains about repeated candy?
[7]