Hyakka Seiran – seiyuu covers famous anime songs
Hyakka Seiran is a project started by Seiyuu Grandprix sometime last year. The premise is simple enough – grab some famous seiyuu, male and female, and get them to cover famous anime songs, then sell some CDs and voice ringtones. Sounds like a winning (money-making) formula, no? So what could possibly go wrong?
The volume I purchased, volume 2 of the female side, contained more than enough names that I’m very familiar with to pique my interest – Inoue Marina, Nazuka Kaori, Pak Romi, Kaneda Tomoko, Hirohashi Ryo and Yamamoto Maria. Throw in some interesting covers – like Inoue Marina covering Gurren Lagann’s “Sorairo Days” and Gundam SEED’s “Annani issyodatta no ni”, Pak Romi’s Fullmetal Alchemist’s “READY STEADY GO”, Mobile Suit Gundam’s “Ai senshi”, Aura Battler Dunbine’s “Dunbine Tobu”, Kaneda Tomoko’s “Combattler V” (yep I’m quite an old school mecha head) it was enough to get me to do a one-click purchase.
However, like everything too good to be true, there’s a catch. You see, they don’t actually get to sing the whole song, rather just snippets of it. “Hyakka” in the title – literally “one hundred songs”, means that the aim was to collect 100 songs on each CD, and how they did it was to have 10 seiyuu each singing 10 snippets to make it 100, so in reality you only get about 7 minutes for each seiyuu. This wasn’t a big issue, as I’ve already read a review which highlighted this fact, so although still rather disappointing, I was ready for it. Production, on the other hand, is clearly on the cheap side. It sounds like they gave the seiyuu no practice at all and just shove them in front of the mic and tell them to sing, karaoke style. Some songs even had clipping in the recording. Painful.
So why am I still talking about it? Not to discourage potential buyers nor going into a rant actually, because even with all the negatives, it still manage to turn out to be somewhat of a neat purchase.
While the karaoke-ness of the recordings was initially a huge turn off, after listening to a few of them singing it dawned on me that it can also be viewed as to how well some of these seiyuu can sing without mixing aids and after touches. While a majority of them sounds more or less like people singing in a karaoke, a few of them performed well enough that it was close to recording level of quality. The ones that managed to do that were Kitamura Eri, Pak Romi and Nakamura Chie.
Working backwards from the list, let’s start with Nakamura Chie. I’m not terribly familiar with Nakamura Chie (I don’t watch Naruto lolz), but she had that old-school style of singing that made her cover of 80’s classic “Pajama no mamade” (Creamy Mami) and “Natsu no Mirage” (Kimagure Orange Road) instantly triggering the nostalgia in me.
Pak Romi’s line up was a trip down the mecha memory lane. Her cover for Turn A Gundam’s “Tsuki no Mayu”, Brain Powerd’s “Ai no Rinkaku (Field)” was just pure love. Also her ability to deliver a sound that almost matches that to MIO’s (now known as MIQ) original powerful vocal performance in “Dunbine Tobu” commands lots of respect.
Finally, Kitamura Eri. Another one full of classics like Rinbu revolution, You Get to Burning, Give a reason, Alone, Pure Snow etc. and possiblly the best cover of Yuzurenai Negai I’ve heard, seconded only to Momoi Halko’s version last year. In fact it did so much for my opinion of Kitamura Eri’s singing ability that if she was to announce a CD right now, I would buy it in a whim with no questions asked.
Some of the other decent ones came from Yamamoto Maria and Inoue Marina. And to top it off Kaneda Tomoko’s track is just off the chart crazy since there is just no way for me, and I assume a lot of others, to take her voice and singing seriously – which is all good and well for comedic effect though.
The CD is clearly for the seiyuu otaku only, and even for those interested, the best way to sum up this CD will be that it’s like a box of chocolate samplers – some are tasty, some are not terribly good, and some makes you crave for more of the same flavour, but in the end there’s just not enough of it. I’ve made clips of what I think were the two best performers on this disk – Kitamura Eri and Pak Romi – and embed them below. Have a listen yourself.
Kitamura Eri’s
Pak Romi’s
January 31st, 2008 at 10:39
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January 31st, 2008 at 19:30
I was never tempted to buy this at all, the first CD had already left me traumatised. To be fair, this one has a much better line-up and those two tracks sound really good – but still not good enough for me to want to fork out ￥3000 to hear a bunch of seiyuu singing karaoke ^^;
February 1st, 2008 at 04:20
> j1m0one
The combination of the line-up and the songs they chosed was enough to win me over, many of the songs used to be my favourites so it was interesting to see how the seiyuu can cover them. Plus there are a few of the seiyuu which I know quite well but haven’t actually had the chance to listen to them sing (KitaEri and Hirohashi Ryo for example), so as a sampler, it was worth that little bit of money I suppose.
Of course, I don’t expect too many people will get the same value out of it.
February 2nd, 2008 at 03:34
OMG, Paku Romi singing Tobe Dunbine ftw!
“Aura Battler… Dunbine! Aura Shooter… Dunbine! Attack, Attack, Attack… Ore wa Senshi!”
Her Cutie Honey sounded ridiculously similar to Koda Kumi too… :\
Oh, I found the albums on Share. :X
I wonder what seiyuus/songs were featured on the first version of these albums.
March 20th, 2009 at 21:26
Please someone send me the Ready Steady Go from Romi Paku. I Rly want it