Tag: 1995

Shiroh Sagisu – Neon Genesis Evangelion [1995; Starchild]

image

In the first collection of music from the cult hit anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, twenty pieces of the score are presented along with three versions of “Fly Me to the Moon”.  Opening with the jazz/techno/pop theme song and Claire Littley’s piano-bar-styled performance of “Fly Me to the Moon” (which serves as the base for the instrumental and “Yoko Takahashi Acid Bossa Nova” versions of the same), the rest of the album carries on the jazz flavor in sometimes-muted ways while using trimmed-down orchestral stylings and a considerable amount of piano.

Some light playfulness, like the Western swing of “Asuka Strikes!”, gives contrast to the more serious pieces with brass and strings, but even the briefest cues show some admirable care put into their arrangement.  Some slight “Habanera” flavor creeps in as well, thanks to background tambourine accenting, while the general flavors experience high turn-over due to the tracks’ short length, with just a couple running over three minutes.  As such, while there’s appreciable quality to all of it, things do end up jumbling together somewhat between the clear-cut opening and ending tracks, leaving it more interesting as a reference library than a stand-alone experience.

Here’s the cover art used for the 2015 reissue.

image

Machines of Loving Grace – Gilt [1995; Mammoth Records, Mushroom, Natasha Records]

image

On their third and final album, Machines of Loving Grace simplify the detail-packed electronics of their previous releases in favor of a more metallic approach, with producer Sylvia Massy (who’d handled, among others, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Powerman 5000, and Tool) behind the boards.  Though it does bring the beat-poetry-influenced lyrics more to the forefront, the plodding pace of many of the songs makes them feel lacking in subtlety, despite some clever textural adornments and near-seamless combinations of looped and live playing.

While the singing operates in a reduced range of cadences, singer Scott Benzel seems to take that as a challenge to pack the words with dramatic inflection.  Though that ends up verging on melodramatic comedy at times, it also meshes with the more apocalyptic flavoring of the songs (e.g., “Solar Temple” and its lyrical push towards consumption, the same for “Last”, with its depressingly unimaginative chorus of ‘This is the last… fucking time! / This is the last time.’, or the junkie resignation of “Casual Users”).  It’s not hard to imagine that the band intended to finish their run with this album, given the general themes, but at the same time, societal morbidity had been a persistent presence in previous LPs as well.

Maybe the most reminiscent of their previous albums is “Twofold Godhead”, an exercise in distortion, with chunk-cut vocal processing flanging back and forth while guitars are sent through banks of delay and echo, spoken samples are beat against the rhythm, and the keyboards swirl up a storm.  Unfortunately, it’s something of a stand-alone in the album, and feels a bit like a frustrated anti-single.  Though it’s certainly a mixed bag, the album does (for the most part) show the band’s character, just through a sharply different form than the rest of their work.