Radiata Stories Arrange Album

	Album Title: Radiata Stories Arrange Album
	Record Label: Team Entertainment
	Catalog No.: KDSD-00063
	Release Date: March 24, 2005
	Purchase: Buy at CDJapan

Overview

This album is bad. That sentence alone can suffice for a review, and is probably as much attention as this album deserves. Unfortunately, though, I’m generous and will give this album the proper treatment. First of all, of the 16 tracks I only would’ve ever considered four of them to be worthy of being arranged. So right away I didn’t have very high expectations, yet even my low expectations were shattered by the horrendously dull and amateur-grade arranging featured. The album is literally dead. Even piano collections have more emotion and life than any of these monotonous tracks. If the track isn’t too repetitive, too long, or too close to it’s original counterpart, than it’s either awkward, lacking melody, or a combination of any of these.

Body

The album is a collection of many types of arrangements, all of them equally as bad or boring, with one exception. Types of arrangements include piano arrangements, which are all either too long, or lacking in the emotion department. The exclusion among these is “Genuine Girl” which is neither too long nor lacking in emotion, but rather suffers from the amateur-grade arranging I mentioned above. The piece simply repeats the same melody in different styles with little original material and even less transitional material — decent, were it fan-arranged, not so great coming from a professional.

The second type of arrangement is the general arrangement, or just taking the original and changing the instrumentation and manipulating the melody. This set of arrangements includes the best and worst track on this album. “Wind ~Scarlet Wind~” may not include the mistakes from the other tracks, but it does have the worst problem of them all… laziness. The “arrangement” is essentially the original track, “Scarlet Wind”, layered with an extremely annoying percussion line. However, there’s also “Hopping Sun” which is the exception I mentioned earlier. This is a beautiful piano and guitar version of the original with some nice synth percussion as an atmospheric accompaniment.

The final type of arrangements is the vocal tracks. These are perhaps the worst, being slightly arranged versions of obscure tracks from the Original Soundtrack featuring lyrics that sound absolutely forced, making the tunes sound awkward an unpleasant to listen to. “Plod Along ~Thank You Mix~” isn’t so bad, as it’s simply a slower version of the main vocal track, but it’s hardly good.

Summary

Do yourself a favor and ignore this album unless you’re having trouble sleeping and have tried every other cheaper methods. Thankfully, “Hopping Sun” and “Plod Along ~Thank You Mix~” prevents this arranged album from being a total catastrophe, but it’s still not worth your hard earned money.

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