ジーザス・クラウド

Last regrets? I have plenty. To be honest, I wouldn’t know where to begin with my disappointment with Darker than Black 2’s soundtrack, if not for the occasional gem it spits out, the fleeting diamond in the rough that wasn’t blatantly hamfisted techno suckage that was the soundtrack.

It’s not that Yasushi Ishii did anything wrong with the tracks that weren’t the techno shit, mind you. It’s that he didn’t do enough. It’s painful to see tracks like this, the arbitrarily named Jesus Cloud and its instrumental counterpart, go down the drain like so, awash in a sea of failure to comprehend Darker than Black as being something more than just your typical action flick. His work exhibited actual promise, nevermind that he was no Yoko Kanno—sometimes not being good is fine. Not being enough, however, is something else altogether.

I like his acoustic guitar work—闇枯れ草 (Yami Karekusa), Gemein Shadow, the aforementioned Jesus Cloud (instrumental) all show great technical proficiency and a ear for the foreboding mood that made Darker than Black stand out among its peers. They show real promise and complexity on a scale most anime music composers don’t seem to have, and Ishii probably mistook the need for variety with a need to pound each nauseatingly techno track (and there are a lot of them) into each battle scene.

I’m really, really sorry if techno is your genre of choice, but it wasn’t meant to be in this case, I’m afraid. As penance, I shall get Yoko Kanno to play the world’s smallest violin for you, and it will sound good. That’s how great she is. Ishii, on the other hand, will probably pepper the whole thing with some disco-electronica variation so that you won’t be able to hear the violin for the beats.