Review Summary: "Halloween is the one day when a soul in purgatory can be released. If he prays hard enough, he can go to heaven at last."
The final Cowboy Bebop soundtrack album,
Future Blues, was the last great hurrah for Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts, who would go on to do nothing spectacular with other anime titles and disband, respectively. As Bebop fans we've grown accustomed to quality soundtrack albums with slick jazz numbers, the occasional silly novelty song, and heavy emotional pieces that resonate long after the final notes ring. The Seatbelts do not disappoint us here. And fans who picked up the teaser EP
Ask DNA will know exactly what they're getting with this album.
The opener, aptly titled "24 Hours OPEN", is string-based poppy elevator music with sproradic screams and sounds of machine gun fire, sirens at 2:00, and a change in the elevator melody at 2:22. It's silly and doesn't mean much, and it tends to wear thin after too many listens. The real opener is the loud, driving "Pushing the Sky", kicking off with a sweet bass riff and Mai Yamane's sultry vocals delivering the opening lines: "Don't wanna be the one to pop your cherry girl / Just jump a train that will bring you back to mama's side". With confrontational lyrics, distorted guitar, and overall hard rock feel, this song brings attitude and oomph (the liner notes include little icons beside the title to indicate "Violence" and "Battle"), and it's one of the highlights of the album.
There's also a good deal of light jazz ("Time to Know ~ Be Waltz") and Johnny Quest-esque bebop ("Clutch", "What Planet Is This?!") and big band parade-style jazz ("Yo Pumpkin Head") that have become The Seatbelts' bread and butter over the course of Cowboy Bebop, as well as a fresh new Arabic flair on "MUSAWE" and "No Money".
But what sets this album apart from its predecessors are two things. The first is the presence of songs that scream "film soundtrack". Starting with the progressive, hard rock guitar instrumental "7 Minutes" and carrying into the smoothly rolling piano number "Fingers", tension-building choral "Powder", somber blues-jazz "Butterfly", and the light rock "No Reply" with its sweeping strings, Steve Conte's belting vocals (he does start to sound like Sting when he sings "Like the perfect ending / It won't be too long"), and grand finale feel, this album takes a turn towards the mundane. The tracks themselves aren't bad and in fact bear the same hallmarks as the rest of The Seatbelts' weightier works, but they lack immediacy and give the impression of belonging in the background. They were written to complement their scenes in the film, to be sure, and aren't so hot as stand-alone single tracks. This is great for a soundtrack (which, we must remember, this is), but not so great for a proper album (which I keep trying to turn it into).
The second thing is an increased rock presence. "Pushing the Sky" and "7 Minutes" are hard rock. "Gotta Knock a Little Harder" begins with a low guitar, soon joined by electric piano and sweet low lyrics about empty indifference with a gentle backing chorus, then it gains volume and urgency and even changes keys twice as it builds into a powerful, soulful song about "tearin' off each piece of chain" and "break[ing] through the door". The kicker here is that this is the first ending theme, and it serves the same purpose that "Blue" did in the TV show but does so with a different tone and a different flavor. "Diggin'" begins with a guitar riff stolen from "Footloose" and Garth Brooks country-rock notes and goofy lyrics about a "spacey little cowgirl" (I confess, this is probably my favorite song on the album). And the bonus track, a demo of fan-favorite "Rain", is shorter and sparser with a wailing electric guitar solo reminiscent of Pink Floyd.
This is a great album. As a soundtrack, it's fantastic. Filled with punch and pizzazz, it presents the film's highs and lows, builds dramatic tension with its placement of the heavier soundtrack songs in the latter half of the album, and even throws in a few of the lighter moments to balance out the emotion. Moreover, with appropriate openers and closers it parallels the film's structure and yields a concise listening experience. Perhaps this is why the album feels different from previous entries in The Seatbelts' repertoire (and why I'm keener on the album's first half than the second); in conveying the many moods and developments of the film, the music suffers a gradual loss of the levity that the show's episodic nature fostered. But beggars can't be choosers. By broadening the scope of Cowboy Bebop, the music itself broadens and becomes more mainstream and more functional and loses, bit by bit, that special something that made it shine. It may be for the best, then, that this was the end of Cowboy Bebop; it was knockin' on heaven's door all along. I'm glad they chose to knock a little harder.
