Death Note Anime OST Review

So anyone who's anyone these days is following Death Note, the hit-manga-turned-hit-anime about a college student who finds a notebook that kills anyone whose names are written in it. Though some people will tell you they're only reading the manga, I'm here to tell you that watching the anime is totally a better experience because it has the power of incredibly dramatic music! They finally put out the soundtrack to the anime, not just the live-action movie, and it really is great, but it gets so intense, it's almost (almost) silly. I am serious here - this is the sort of OST that makes eating potato chips a matter of life and death. If you're looking for the most dramatic songs yet used in the anime, Kyrie is the sad, tense choral melody used when Light is being particularly evil; and Low of Solipsism is the dramatic song used in the potato chip incident. Both of them are heavy-handed orchestral themes with plenty of choir action in there. And then there are so songs that are so extreme, they haven't even been used yet (so far as I know) in the anime - such as Death Note Theme and the Sephiroth-killer Domine Kira, or as I like to call it, "One-Winged Light". There are plenty of other gems in the soundtrack that I'm sure I'll discover in their full right after a few days of listening, such as L's Theme and Shudder (Senritsu), both of which utilize a nice grainy electric guitar and a piano, and have pretty awesome melodies.

Overall, I'm quite impressed with the audio quality that Yoshihisa Hirano and Hideki Taniuchi have come up with here. It's not only an incredibly atmospheric soundtrack, setting the mood perfectly for the show - it's also quite listenable and with some songs that can really literally make anything intense. So next time you eat potato chips, you know where to turn.

Update: I have gone back and uploaded all the old fileden stuff to Dreamhost, so if you had any problems about downloading files from us before, there should be no such problems now - things should be consistent and blazing fast, too. If the RSS feed seems out of order, that's an unfortunate side-effect of all this. To celebrate our ability to host more stuff now, I've also uploaded a 30-second demo from the Death Note anime soundtrack:

Light's Theme [484k, .mp3]