Conventional Wisdom: My First Japanese CDs - Cowboy Bebop: Blue

First of all, let’s get the single biggest nitpick out of the way right off the bat: the cover of Blue is REALLY boring. Cowboy Bebop and No Disc both had covers that looked like old school Jazz records, but Blue just looks like a generic New Age album. It’s especially insulting because the album booklet contains a MUCH more interesting alternate cover that continues the old fashioned aesthetic. I think that one would have captured the spirit of both the music on the album and Cowboy Bebop as a series MUCH better than something a kid could whip up in Photoshop after five minutes. This looks like a CD-R somebody sells at their gigs at the local coffee shop. Okay, art rant over. Let’s get on to the music, because Blue is MUCH better in that regard.

Technically speaking, Blue isn’t the last Cowboy Bebop soundtrack by a long shot, but it still gets honorary “climactic ending” status just for being the one with that title track. My whole memory of Blue as an album is dominated by “Blue” as a song. Cowboy Bebop is “the one with all the Jazz songs,” No Disc is “the one that’s totally random,” and Blue is “The one with all the big vocal ballads.” That’s not even remotely accurate, as only half of the songs have vocals at all, and nobody in the world is going to call “Chicken Bone” or “Mushroom Hunting” a “big ballad.” But “Blue” is just such a monster of an opening track that it permanently overwrites my other memories of the album, and that’s BEFORE you factor in the emotional baggage of it being our final memories of the show itself. It sounds amazing, from the ethereal Latin singing at the begining to Mai Yamane belting the absolute CRAP out of the song all the way through. The entire world is a lesser place for the fact that nobody ever got David Bowie to record a cover of this song; it would have been a thing of beauty.

Beyond the title track, Blue really does have a fairly strong selection of big vocal numbers, with Steve Conte pulling double duty on “Words That We Couldn’t Say” and “Call Me Call Me.” The former is a pleasantly inoffensive bit of adult contemporary pop with a slightly Latin flair, while the later sounds like what would have happened if Noel Gallagher had quit Oasis early to start a new career writing ending themes for anime shows (seriously, any other show would have used this as its closing credits tune). “Flying Teapot” is the one time I can actually make the “I’m sure these words sounded good together to a non-English speaker” joke, since it was Tomoko Tane who wrote these severely awkward lyrics instead of Tim Jensen. And God bless her, Emily Bindiger ALMOST pulls off a sufficiently natural vocal performance to distract us from how unnatural those words sound.  Thankfully, Bindiger also gets to sing “Adieu,” a more straightforward Jazz ballad that’s probably my second or third favorite song on the album after “Blue.” It’s also a full-song version of the melody previously introduced in the first album’s closing track, “Memory,” and I’m always a sucker for a good reprise.  “Wo Qui Non Coin” is my other candidate for second favorite, a somewhat paradoxical mix of whimsy and melancholy with another “Gabriela Robin” vocal performance. Actually “paradoxical mix of whimsy and melancholy” just might be the perfect description of Cowboy Bebop as a whole. There’s also “Ave Maria,” though not the one everybody automatically thinks of, (Schubert, not Bach) which would sound really out of place on either of the previous discs but actually fits the mood of Blue quite nicely. Tulivu-Donna Cumberbatch makes another appearance on this album with “Mushroom Hunting,” though this is a pretty far cry from “The Singing Sea.” Really, “Mushroom Hunting” isn’t even about the vocals, those could just as easily been a string of random samples strung together and they’d have had the same effect. The song is all about its bouncy bass riff, with the vocals just there as an added detail. And then there’s “Chicken Bone,” which… I’m not even sure what to say about. I guess Yoko Kanno listened to a lot of Cibo Matto and decided she wanted to do her own vaguely Hip Hop ode to food? I dunno. It’s the oddest song on Blue, and that’s saying a lot when it comes immediately after “Go Go Cactus Man,” a full-on parody of Ennio Morricone spaghetti western themes.

Speaking of which, let’s get into the instrumental tracks. As I said, despite Blue being the album I always remember as being full of big vocal numbers, around half the tracks are instrumentals. In fact, this one has a lot more Jazz numbers than No Disc does, though I’m honestly having a little trouble coming up with anything interesting to say about any of them. “Autumn In Ganymede” could easily have been a track on the first album, save for some random vocal samples thrown in to spice things up, and “N.Y. Rush” is basically IS just a stripped down remake of “Rush” from that album. On the one hand, I kind of like the sparser arrangement instead of the full band, but it’s still too fast and messy for me. On the other hand, I REALLY like “Road To The West,” a spacy, ethereal mix of saxophone and synths that sounds a lot like something out of Blade Runner. The box set has an alternate mix of “Road To The West” with a techno beat added over everything, but the version on Blue is absolutely the keeper for me. Just as good is “Stella By Moor,” that music box song from the episode “Waltz for Venus” that also happens to be the same melody as “The Singing Sea” on No Disc and “Cosmos” on Cowboy Bebop. Like I said, I’m a sucker for a good reprise.

It’d be disingenuous of me not to mention that Blue also has probably the only song on the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack that I actively HATE: “The Real Man.” An ugly, atonal mess of drum beats and the sound of a brass band farting, with a bass line struggling to fight its way out from underneath, “The Real Man” EVENTUALLY manages to pull itself into something resembling an actual song by the halfway point, but it’s not worth the wait. This is the one track that really only works in its original context as accompaniment of a visual element (namely, the Aliens parody “Toys In The Attic”). For all the decent songs that got left off the three main soundtrack albums to be bonus tracks on the box set or whatever, it amazes me that “The Real Man” made it onto here.

Oh, and before I forget, I should also mention Blue’s own bonus track: “See You Space Cowboy” (a.k.a. “See You Space Cowboys Not Final Mountain Root”) It’s that alternate version of “Real Folk Blues” that played during the big shootout in the final episode, a with different lyrics, less horns, more piano, and a generally sparser production. It’s a nice enough Easter Egg… though I gotta be honest, if I hadn’t also bought Vitaminless at the same time as the other three albums, I would have been TICKED OFF to have this weird other take of “Real Folk Blues” but not the ACTUAL “Real Folk Blues” anywhere. Spoiler for a few of the future blogs, but I got burned several times over buying albums that didn’t have the songs I thought they did. If the dude running the table selling all of these soundtracks hadn’t pointed out that none of the discs I was buying had the song I naturally assumed must be on at least ONE of them, I’d have been a grumpy little weeb indeed, and it might have poisoned my warm feelings for the album overall.

(BIG GIANT EDIT: as I went back over this one to proofread, some fuzzy, repressed memories re-emerged, and I now think that actually IS what happened. Stay tuned for more in the follow-up blog)

As it stands, though, I still really love Blue. It can’t hold a candle to the nostalgic impact of Cowboy Bebop, but Blue as a whole still hits me in the feels a lot harder than No Disc does. Obviously, it’s impossible to hear the title track without getting overpowered by memories of the show, but just about every track still brings me back to that initial surge of excitement to actually have a piece of an anime at home to listen to whenever I felt like. This is just the sound of early, innocent otakudom. And somehow, even after all these blogs, we’re STILL not done with Cowboy Bebop yet…