Fire Bomber ready to take off !

Hi everybody ! Today we have an album of Jrock/anime rock courtesy of fictional rock band "Fire Bomber". The members of this band, specially the two singers, are the main characters of the TV anime series "Macross 7", sequel to the CLASSIC (yes, in capital letters) TV series of 1982, "Super Dimensional Fortress Macross". The original Macross was a cultural phenomenon in and outside Japan, and it achieved massive popularity worldwide when it was bought by Harmony Gold, rewritten and pasted together with two other unrelated TV series, and then aired for western audiences under the name of "Robotech".

Macross is still being broadcasted from time to time around the globe, harvesting new fans. The reason is simple: it was just a great script intertwining a love triangle with a serious sci-fi story. Sequels to Macross had been done before Macross 7. There was the movie retelling the events of the TV series, the mediocre (except for the soundtrack by Shiroh Sagisu) OVA series "Macross II" -which was quickly wiped out of any continuity- and the gorgeous OVA series "Macross Plus" that counted with a score by Yoko Kanno.

Macross 7 was the return of the Macross saga to the airwaves. Though it didn't get the same response from critics and viewers as the original cult favorite, it was a decent work and produced its own spin-offs in the form of a movie and two OVA series. Something that has always been taken care of in any product entitled "Macross whatever" is the music. In the original story, music played an important part and so it did in this sequel in particular. The soundtrack was composed by Shiroh Sagisu and Yoko Kanno, and for the singing voices of the main characters -Basara and Mylenne-, they got Yoshiki Fukuyama (of JAM Project) and Chie Kajiura respectively.

What you have right here is the BEST OF CD of the rock band they are members of: Fire Bomber. You have the OP & EDs of the TV series (tracks 11 & 13, 10, 8, in that order), the OP & ED of the OVA series Macross 7 Dynamite (tracks 14 & 5), plus other remarkable songs such as the monster ballads "Light the light" & "Angel voice". Despite being a group that existed only on celluloid, Fire Bomber released singles and albums that were big hits in Japan, and they performed in sold out concerts nationwide. Their sound is anime rock fusioned with acoustic and pop at times. I hope you like it.

To give you a hint of how the album below will sound, take a look at the following clip, the OP of the series set to the music of the song "Seventh Moon", courtesy of Angalus @ YouTube. And right after it, the OP to the OVA, "Dynamite Explosion", uploaded on YouTube by laputabx.

A special mention goes to Haruhiko Mikimoto, the character designer of the original Macross and of Macross 7, who did the artwork for this album. He's one of my favorite manga authors and he even did a manga set in the same universe, called Macross 7 Trash. Check it out if you can. Here's the album !