This Anime Soundtrack Is Pure Gold

I’ve said before that I think music from anime series is well worth listening to, including entire soundtracks, such as the Hunter x Hunter soundtrack.

At the end of my post on shamelessly listening to anime music, I included the end credits song to Kekkai Sensen (or Blood Blockade Battlefront), one of the many songs my child has gotten me hooked on.

And then a year or so ago, she started playing the soundtrack to the second season, Kekkai Sensen & Beyond (Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond). Covering different genres and sung in different languages, the soundtrack is excellent.

It opens with “Block Scholars,” a fusion of jazz and hip-hop…

… and moves on to the Brazilian-influenced “Poupees Vadoux,” complete with a cuica, one of my favorite instruments (it may be a silly one to be a favorite, but hearing one always makes me happy).

And that’s just the beginning. Several of the songs are jazzy, but stylistically they’re very different from each other. “Dare to Say” is an up-tempo big band piece, “White Beyond” is a vocal ballad, and “Minor Doll” reminds me of the jazz fusion that bands like Weather Report and Spyro Gyra were coming out with in the 1970s and ’80s.

There’s classical influence, too, including “Rhapsody in Blue,” which uses Gershwin’s original piece, and “Pebble Walts,” which reminds me of Claude Bolling’s Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano.

In a couple of places above, I’ve mentioned how songs remind me of pieces or bands that I know. While the album doesn’t feel derivative to me, there are times when I can’t help but wonder if I’m the only one who hears echoes of music I know while listening to this soundtrack. For instance, doesn’t “A Queen of the Night” sound a bit like something Steely Dan would write?

I know most of what I’ve chosen to share with you has had some ties to jazz, so here’s something completely different — the hard-rocking “Determine On.”

I’ve only scratched the surface here. There are several more songs I’d love to include, but the purpose of this blog post is not to recreate the entire album, so I’ll just say: Give it a listen. The Kekkai Sensen & Beyond soundtrack is available on Spotify, or you can purchase it on Amazon. (You’ll have better results if you search using the Japanese name, and I might as well ‘fess up now that one of the Spotify playlists that will come up when you search is mine. I’ve paired every song on the soundtrack with a song that I think complements it, so every other song on the playlist is not from the soundtrack.)