Conventional Wisdom: My First Japanese CDs - "FLCL Soundtracks Vol. 1, 2, & 3" - the pillows (Patreon)

Okay, THIS time I really am lumping several albums into one blog post.  After all, this time there’s a nearly absolute level of overlap between the disks AND a multitude of tracks that clock in at under two minutes. What could go wrong?

A lot of things, actually. This blog might end up being even more rambly than any of the others, because HOLY CRAP the FLCL soundtrack hits me right in the feels. Every single time I go back and re-watch the anime, I’m caught completely off guard by the sheer nostalgic power crammed into these songs. And now, sitting down and listening to the albums themselves all the way through for the first time in years, the memories hit me even harder. I know I talked about that happening a lot with both the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack and that L’Arc~en~Ciel album, but all of those rolled up together still doesn’t come CLOSE to matching the nostalgic overload that the FLCL soundtrack evokes in the deepest, darkest corners of my brain. I have EMOTIONS about these songs, man and I guarantee you’re gonna get sick of hearing me talk about them by the time you hit the end of this blog.

Yes, there’s plenty of turn-of-the-millennium anime kids who have the same reactions as I do about this stuff. FLCL was one of those key early Adult Swim shows that introduced a lot of people to the whole idea of non-Pokemon anime, and the intense spotlight it shone on the pillows made them the first Japanese band a whole wave of people ever knew by name (ESPECIALLY if they weren’t fans of Visual Kei). I absolutely feel all that, even if FLCL honestly wasn’t all that high on my list of anime to obsess over. Like, I was impressed by the animation and energy, but it didn’t suck me into its universe like other shows did… which clearly wasn’t the goal of a show like FLCL in the first place, so whatevs. Honestly, FLCL is one of those I always enjoy when I watch it again, but only ever do when somebody else puts it on. I rarely if ever revisit it of my own volition. I revisit my memories of watching it way more than I actually watch it. But we’re not here to talk about FLCL the ANIME, are we? The point is, this soundtrack also caries a whole SECOND layer of emotional resonance for me, a purely personal one that hits all the harder than my memories of the anime itself.

I’ve mentioned before that Contemporary Music basically didn’t exist for me until my late teens. My parents raised me on a steady diet of Oldies and Classic Rock, and that was more than enough to get me by for a long time. It wasn’t until the dawn of the 21stCentury, between the rise of weird Indie acts like The Flaming Lips and of Montreal on one side and the explosion of Garage Bands like The White Stripes and The Strokes on the other, that I started to have any interest in new music being produced right then at that very moment. After years of experiencing music by way of rooting through bins of thirty-year-old used records, I was opening up to a whole new dimension of current rock bands AT THE SAME TIME as this vast reservoir of Japanese media was finally becoming accessible. The FLCL soundtrack what where those dual interests most overlapped.

I had a somewhat forced interest in the L’Arc~en~Ceil album simply because it came from Japan, but I never would have listened to it under other circumstances. Not so with the pillows. This was a band that ABSOLUTELY fit in with that whole early-aughts Garage Band craze I was already caught up in. Yes, I know that the pillows don’t really sound anything like The Strokes or The White Stripes (if anything, they sound like The Foo Fighters recording a tribute album to The Pixies, then throwing in some Oasis ballads for some reason) but then, MOST of the bands who got a career boost as a part of that “movement” didn’t sound anything like its figureheads. Such is the way of things. The point is, the pillows were a band I would have gladly listened to just on the strength of being a good rock band, the fact that they were from Japan and prominently connected to a really cool anime just made a good thing all the better. On several overlapping levels, the FLCL Soundtrack reminds me of the thrilling promise of a new world of cool things just waiting to be discovered. These sounds will always be the sound of excitement and wonder for me, the sound of something good on the horizon. Of course, subsequent decades have taught me that most of my excitement was misplaced, and I’ve largely given up any attempt to stay current in favor of going BACK to rooting through used bins. Most of the “new” media I discover now is decades-old stuff I just missed the first time around. But the memories remain, as the previous blogs repeatedly attest. Now days, revisiting that brief flash of naive exuberance only makes the FLCL Soundtrack even more emotionally charged. It sure felt nice to have not been let down yet. Oh, to be that young and stupid again.

But that’s enough about me, we’re ignoring the weirdest aspect of these albums: the alternate versions of the songs. If you don’t know, the bulk of the pillows’ songs on FLCL weren’t newly written for the OVAs but had already appeared on their previous few albums. Except, they didn’t, not like this. While a number of the songs did get played in their original form, many more were remixed into short instrumentals to be used as incidental music. And for reasons we’ll probably never fully understand, the first two FLCL Soundtrack discs released those short, vocal-free versions of the songs instead of the full versions. Because this was still the very tail end of the days when people couldn’t just whip out their smartphones and instantly Google the answer to every question in the world, a LOT of people over here didn’t realize that wasn’t how those songs were originally meant to be heard. To this day, I occasionally see 2002-era blurbs about the pillows copy/pasted onto websites that describe them as a band who largely record short instrumental songs, and I’m not afraid to admit that I didn’t know better myself at the time. Of course, then Vol. 3 came out, which complied the original album versions of all those songs and I got PROFOUNDLY weirded out.

I can still remember how disorienting it felt to hear “Sad Sad Kiddie” with actual words for the first time. I knew that song entirely as a riff and a solo, and the weird syncopation between the riff and the vocal track only seemed to clutter up and dilute the main attraction. I didn’t like it… which is hilarious because listening back to the vocal-free version NOW, for the first time in years, I had the exact opposite experience. I’ve heard the full version so many more times that my brain just automatically tried to fill the missing lyrics in; the song felt empty and incomplete without them. It was the same with “Stalker” and “Bran-new Love Song” and “Patricia” and “Carnival” and the whole list of ‘em. Even now, as I sit here writing this, I try to remember the instrumental version and my brain just refuses to provide anything but the lyrical ones. I think “Sleepy Head” and “Come Down” are the only songs that still reside in my memory as instrumentals first and foremost, and that’s most because I just don’t like them as much in general. Well, that and “Last Dinosaur,” just ‘cos the instrumental version was played over the Next Episode preview in every episode.

But the songs that WERE released with lyrics right off the bat, oh man. Those instrumental/not-instrumental songs have their nostalgic charge split between multiple versions, but songs like “Instant Music,” “Funny Bunny,” “Hybrid Rainbow,” and “Little Busters” focus all those memories onto one concentrated point. AND they have the added power of being used in the most memorable moments of the anime. When Time/Life puts out one of those “Remember When You WEREN'T Old?” box sets for otaku on the wrong end of middle age, these are the songs they’ll play on the 2am infomercial. “I Think I Can” is what my own personal Oldies Station sounds like. “Blues Drive Monster” is the theme song to my generation’s Happy Days. This is all completely useless to anyone who hasn’t already seen FLCL, of course, I’ve barely even described what the songs sound like. But that’s kind of my point. These songs aren’t really even “songs” anymore to nerds like me, they’re moments, and pretty dang good ones at that. I know this are strong words for music from a show I claimed to not be all THAT into up top, but I think that’s paradoxically part of where the power over me comes from. I discovered all those Cowboy Bebop albums around the same time as these FLCL ones, but I’ve listened those SO much over the years, in so many different situations, that they’ve become a bit more divorced from the original memory than these have. I’ve yet to hear “Ride On Shooting Star” in any other context enough that it stops being “the FLCL song” and taking be directly back to that specific point in time.

Even if you DON’T have any deep nostalgic connection to the songs or the anime, though, the FLCL soundtracks are a great compilation of rock songs that anyone with an interest in Japanese Alterna/Indie would do well to check out… although that brings up an odd question. From the moment Vol. 3 was first released, there was a debate among fans if anyone even NEEDED to buy 1 and 2 anymore. 3’s really the complete package, right? Does anybody really even need those instrumental versions of the songs? Well, that’s up to the individual listener, of course. Some completists may indeed want every single version of every song the pillows officially released. The more important issue is that Vol. 3 is NOT as “complete” at is seems at first glance, there’s actually some glaring omissions on this compilations. Objectively speaking, the biggest deal is probably “One Life,” one of the standout lyrical tracks on Vol. 1 and one of the most memorable signature songs from the anime. And it’s certainly a good song, in that Noel Gallagher way a lot of pillows ballads are, but it’s not the omission that annoys me the most. No, I’m angry that Vol. 3 doesn’t contain the full of version of “Patricia.” The instrumental version was one of my favorite parts of Vol. 2, and once I finally heard the full, bouncy, 60s-esque version on Little Busters, it became one of my favorite pillows songs period. So what gives with leaving it off of Vol. 3? As for the other omissions, “Bran-new Love Song” also only appears in its instrumental form on Vol. 1, and that disk also has a second version of “Stalker” (“Stalker Goes To Babylon”) which isn’t available elsewhere, if you’re into that sort of thing. Vol. 2 also contains the vocal track “White Ash” that doesn’t pop up on Vol. 3 again, though I think that’s one of the lesser songs on the soundtrack. So, are these hiccups enough to make Vol. 1 & 2 worth having separately from Vol. 3? Well… honestly, I’d just say go buy the actual pillows albums. Seriously, if you like the stuff you hear on FLCL, you’ll like everything else that’s on Please Mr. Lostman, Little Busters, Runners High, or Happy Bivouac. Aside from the instrumentals, the only stuff that’s not on those albums is “I Think I Can” and “Ride On Shooting Star,” and you can easily grab both of those on iTunes. Or heck, you could just mix and match whatever individual tracks you feel like that way. We’re in the future now, dang it, you don’t need to buy ANY whole albums anymore.

…except there’s ONE more detail I’ve left out this whole way: the NON-pillows tracks on Vol. 1 & 2. Yes, both CDs contain additional incidental music by composer Shinkichi Mitsumune, making them all the more like real soundtracks as opposed to Vol. 3’s compilation. The thing is, I have absolutely NO memory of any of Mitsumune’s song actually being in FLCL. Like, at all. The only musical moment in all of FLCL I remember that ISN’T a pillows song is that orchestral bit that plays during the big rampage sequence in episode 3, and that’s the one bit of music Mitsumune DIDN’T write (apparently it’s a familiar stock “sport’s day” song in Japan). You could tell me that the songs were commissioned for FLCL but never actually used, only released on the soundtrack as a favor to the composer, and I’d have no proof on hand that it wasn’t true. It’s not even that they’re BAD songs, either. They’re all perfectly serviceable anime soundtrack tunes, but they could just as easily be used any other anime and nobody would be able to tell the difference. If you’re buying the whole albums anyway, you’re not gonna have any reason to regret having them in your collection, but I can’t imagine there’s any reason to go out of your way to get these tracks. Well… “Memories of Summer” might be worth seeking out at least once, just to laugh at the obvious theft of a bit of the “Beauty & The Beast” melody.

The other non-pillows content is a lot more unusual. Vol. 2 contains five audio dramas by the original cast, apparently serving as a sort of sequel to FLCL. I say “apparently” because nobody ever recorded English versions of any of these dramas, and I’ve never really cared enough to look up the translations. They could be completely non-canon gag skits for all I know, that’d be pretty on-brand for FLCL. Still, I supposed it’d be interesting to compare these audio dramas to the ACTUAL FLCL sequels and see how they relate to each other. Otherwise, I personally don’t think they’re worth going out of your way to get FLCL Vol. 2 over the original pillows albums. Unless you’re a MAJOR FLCL superfan, you’re probably better off going that way, and I say this AFTER rambling and rambling about how nostalgic I am over these disks. I’m never gonna get RID of my copies, they still mean a lot to me, but if you’re not coming out of that same specific nostalgia storm, there’s better ways to hear all of this music.

To backtrack just a bit, though, I do need to admit that, No, I have NOT watched FLCL Progressive or FLCL Alternative. I don’t hate the idea of them as much as a lot of my fellow otaku did when they were first announced, I just kinda don’t care. There’s no way they’d have the same nostalgic pull on me that the originals did, and nothing about them look interesting enough to compel me to watch ‘em just on their own. I bring that up to say that I don’t have FooL on CooL Generation, the soundtrack compilation the pillows released for the later anime. And yet, I WILL be talking about some of the songs that appear on that soundtrack, in a different context. Not right way, but it IS coming, so stay tuned for that!