Basilisk Opening Theme - Onmyouza - Koga ninpocho 陰陽座

I've just caught the entire series of Basilisk anime over the weekend. Before I write a review of what I think about it, I'll talk about the Opening Theme of the anime first.

No matter which anime, the first thing and foremost thing which catches my most attention, would be the opening theme song. Maybe the music part is really important to me, or maybe it is just the thing which draws me into the mood of the story. I'm not very particular about song lyrics as long as I can "feel" the emotions from the way the singer expresses him/herself. Some songs may be very meaningful or beautiful lyrically, but if I just don't understand or can't relate to what it is trying to express, no matter how nice the lyrics are, I just would not get drawn to it. Which probably explains why I've been listening to Japanese songs since I was as young as 13, and get "scolded" from other family members disturbed with my constant "obsession" of listening to Japanese songs. (Japanese anime / manga were expensive to get, and CDs just started getting popular over cassette and video tapes. Internet was just starting to boom, there were no such thing as youtube, wikipedia for me to search for songs or things I would like to read up on. We only had the encyclopedia then, and that alone was like such a hugeeee amount of knowledge and information for me to learn and absorb.)

Oops, sorry I digressed into my "childhood" times. But anyways, just to sum it up, as long as the song is EMO enough, then I'll most probably enjoy it lol~! Basilisk's opening theme song is by this band named "Onmyouza". Usually I would get bored / irritated with the opening themes of animes, having to listen to them everytime I open another episode of the anime. Once I get bored, I would just drag the video cursor to skip the song.

For "Koga ninpocho", I have no idea was it the time I had to spend waiting for the anime to load online anyway, that made it so easy for me to listen to the song over and over again. So just a little earlier tonight, I searched in Youtube for this song, found out that this band is kinda like a Visual-Kei Jrock band (which brings back some of the jrocker blood in me). Somehow this song (especially the Live version) reminds me alot of XJapan's music. I really like the guitar riffs and especially the guitar solo, maybe because the guitars were Ibanez, which was why it sounded like XJapan? I found it really interesting that for once, there is actually a Jrock band which featured a female leading vocal^^. In my opinion, I think this adds a very very nice touch and twist to the usual guy-ish jrock opening theme which alot of animes features. A female voice just makes the song so much more "fluid" and portrays a more subtle impression, otherwise it might have given me the impression that this anime was all macho-action hack-and-slash type with a male voice. It does help that her singing voice is not the cutesy / ultra-sweet type either. I appreciate this singing voice of hers, although it made me imagine her to be much older (she looks around my age? o.o), but the way she sang it adds a very very womanly tone to the song. I wish to be in her shoes, but I guess it was just not meant to be for me. It was always my dream but I guess I shall not bore you with the hopes and dreams which I had but never got to fulfill. I liked her smoky-eyes too in the Live version video clip.

So here I'm linking 3 different versions of the song for your enjoyment^^ =x

1) Basilisk Anime Opening Theme




P.S. I love the flute part where the anime version was ending too! (Kinda fits the story well with a flute tune)

2) The MV version (gotta love the kimonos o.O lol!)




3) The Live version (Nice performance!)






Note:
posted in "anime" on imeem blog.