The flight of the Garnet Crow

Ok, guys, so... as I had told you via the comments box to your right, today we have yet another greatest hits album ! Yay ! :-P You know that the aim of this blog has always been to introduce newcomers to Jpop/Jrock acts, and I think that there is no better way of doing that than presenting to you compilations of their best material and, if you dig what you hear, just leave you free to check out the rest of the discography of the artist or group in question, don't you agree ? This time, I'm posting a collection released last year by another one of my favorite groups: Garnet Crow.

Garnet Crow is a quartet formed by Yuri Nakamura on vocals, Azuki Nana and Hirohito Furui on keyboards, and Hitoshi Okamoto in guitars. One of the main reasons for their popularity is the originality and versatility of Yuri's voice and the depth and poetry of Azuki's lyrics for their songs. Yuri's voice -just like Akira Asakura's, the vocialist of ROmantic Mode- is very different from what you usually hear in the Japanese scene. Blessed with a wider than average range, Yuri is specially confident singing in a low register for adding dramatic tones to the lyrics, but goes higher when the tempo calls for it with equal mastery. It's enough to listen to the beautiful, haunting "In little time" to understand what I'm talking about... The combination of her expressivity with the quality of the lyrics was enough for them to be noticed quite early in their artistic career. Their story started in 1999, when the two girls -who were already friends struggling to make it in the music world- met the guys in a recording studio. They found that they all had in common their passion for music and were equally frequenting studios for cutting demos. They quickly draw the attention of music producers thanks to the catchy melodies and simple arrangements of their songs, fusioning pop and light rock. The affinity between the four of them grew stronger as they rehearsed as a group, and soon Garnet Crow managed to edit an EP called "First Kaleidoscope ~kimi no uchi ni tsuku made zutto hashitte yuku~", which was a major success in the indies scenes. Track 1 from their BEST OF album below ("kimi no uchi ni tsuku made zutto hashitte yuku") is precisely taken from that indies EP and you can notice by the sound quality that the guys were tight on the budget back then... Check them out performing in concert one of their hits, the song "Kimi to Iu Hikari", courtesy of uenokado @ YouTube, for a first sample on how they sound live as a group:

Their official debut in the music scene, recording for a major, was in March 2000 when their single "Mysterious Eyes" was released as OP # 7 of that long-lasting, cult-favorite TV series, "Detective Conan". Here's the clip of that opening, thanks to K.Himura @ Imeem.com, as a sort of additional preview to Garnet Crow's music before you download the album. You have to bear the intro with Conan telling the viewer about the episode of the day, and then at the end his reading the list of sponsors of the TV series, but it's a cute video and gives you an idea of how the OPs are really shown on TV over there ^_^:

Just like B'z, Garnet Crow developed a long partnership with that TV series, aditionally contributing four ED songs up to now (# 10, 14, 18 & 20; the first two -"Natsu no maboroshi" & "Yumemita ato de"- included in the CD below).

But their relationship with animation projects was not limited to Conan. Almost all of their hits are linked to anime series, having provided OP's & ED's to the likes of Project Arms ("Call my name"), Patapata Hikousen no Bouken ("Naked Story") and, recently, two OPs and an ED to the animated adaptation of the manga MÄR. Their music, therefore, is well known in the fandom.

The albums "Sparkle", "Crystallize" and "I'm waiting for you" would continued their initial string of hits. But even if their work has benefited from the diffusion that the partnership with anime entails, they haven't reached in Japan the level of outstanding success that they merit, being considered as critical darlings but not fully embraced by the masses.

In 2005, willing to close a first chapter in their career after only 5 years of activity, they put out their first "BEST OF" album, a collection of hits, self-covers, fan-favorite album tracks and new songs in a double CD package. I'm just posting CD1 of the compilation and hope that you like the 14 songs therein included to the point of buying the album and enjoying the second disc as well. My favorite in this CD is undoubtedly "Sen ijou no kotoba wo nabaretemo...", and if they hadn't made such a crappy video for it, I would have posted it as well for gracing these lines... :-P

Here's the album ! Let me know what you think of it and hope to be back soon with more music...