fripside's songs have catchy phrases...but their connections are mediocre

glennmagusharvey

Excellent example of this problem:

This song sounds like they had catchy, cool ideas for phrases.  Then they strung them together in song form (i.e., intro, verse, refrain, verse, refrain, etc.).  And that's about it.  There really doesn't seem much rhyme or reason to the dramatic pacing of the sections or their tonalities.  So for example you have a refrain that's far higher-pitched than the verse, so much so that it feels disconnected.  And the key change between them doesn't help.

Sometimes, their stuff works right.  "only my railgun" and "Heaven is a place on Earth" both show off intriguing uses of the major/minor relationship between their verses and refrains (Fmin verse/Abmin refrain and Emaj verse/Emin refrain respectively).  But sometimes it just feels hamhandedly thrown in.  For example, the "gear change" down a half step in the post-bridge refrain in "only my railgun" just to gear change back up to the original key is just...weird.  And the gear change up a half step in the middle of the refrain of "judgelight" doesn't work well at all because, well, you've got to somehow get back to the original key for the following verse, and they accomplish it by, well, unsubtly gear-changing it back down immediately as the verse starts.

Say what you will about the transition from verse to refrain in Nana Mizuki's "Take a Shot", but it's weird-ass A-B-D-G chord does at least have some semblance of voice-leading that can bring it elegantly back to a C# minor home chord.  (The bass goes A->B->C#, the A elsewhere resolves down to G#, B to C#, D to C# or E, and G to G#.)

Oh by the way, the theme song for Kowarekake no Orgel (which also goes by that name), written by Tsukasa (of Sound Online), is also guilty (in its full-length version) of the gear-change-downward-for-post-bridge-refrain thing.

glennmagusharvey

Also, I strongly suspect that fripside pitches-up at least some of their songs.  For example, the song "sky".  That does NOT sound like a natural voice.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but just changes the sort of experience I ought to expect from them.

Naas_Human

Only sort of relevant, but, I really like "fortissimo-the ultimate crisis-". It seems to be an awesome song for use in fanvids.

Example: Madoka Magica, Ultraman Gaia

The vids are pretty spoilery for each show, but I think anybody here who cares about Madoka already know what happens, and for the second one, I imagine most of you here wouldn't really be able to tell what's going on. The lyrics ares somewhat appropriate for PMMM, and I like how the Gaia vid makes Agul/Fujimiya look damn manly despite (or rather because it is) using a high-pitched female voice. Or maybe I just see it that way due to the Ultraman Gaia soundtrack.