Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Music on My Mind



Kalafina, "Magia". (I actually like this version a little bit better, but embedding is disabled for it.) Kalafina is a very pop girl band as only Japan can make pop girl bands; they are most famous for doing theme and background music for anime series. Girl-band anime music is not my usual cup of tea, but this one is the theme from Puella Magi Madoka Magica, a beautiful, haunting, and in some parts very, very dark Faust-inspired story. If you're interested in the English, this English-language cover captures it pretty well -- the translation is loose, but it very carefully preserves all the major images. Like practically all anime theme songs with lyrics it pretty much tells the entire story of the series but not in a way that would lead you to expect the story to unfold as it actually does.