With Natsuiro Kiseki over for the time being, the summer of Sphere continues this week with their third album, titled Third Planet. Unfortunately the cheeky astronomical title didn’t help because I was listening to Red Planet all day long, resulting in a strong urge to make a Cowboy Bebop joke. It’s a jarring dissonance when you mash calming yet spine-tingling shrills from one of the best who’s touched an anime, against the popular yet generic idol pop that we have now come to know as Sphere’s music.

I think it’s safe to say that Sphere is a relatively inoffensive music operation, and by inoffensive as in if you don’t snob idol music per se. Simply put, that’s not their primary function. If easy-to-sing-to and easy-to-dance-to tunes can carry their image to the heart of their fans and uphold those wota calls and dances, as we have here, then that’s what Sphere will sound like. It’s not so much a testament of some extreme sense of savvy or some underrated skills the members of Sphere or their management are holding back on us, but simply solid, wise choices. To put it in perspective, I have heard better and worse.

In my Mars state of mind, however, I cannot quite fathom why anyone would take this particular, well, Earth-ly product,  so seriously. Ever since their ATMOSPHERE debut Sphere has been pretty much that one thing we expected them to be: seiyuu idols. Their slow rise in popularity merely confirms their solid play and planning, not to mention simply being hard at work. It’s like opening up to that page of a particular monthly seiyuu mag and it said “MINAKO Good Job!” I had to agree.

The simple, artificial feeling I get from Third Planet comes across best when I put on, say, “Feathering me, Y/N?” Because they’re a quartet and their music necessarily need to reflect this, the arrangements often feel kind of constrained. Only a couple of the songs play to the strength of the 4-woman format…actually, other than “Hazy,” I don’t really think any of the songs did a good job at this. Musically, Third Planet is marginally and incrementally better than Spring Is Here, a year ago; unfortunately that means very little. Perhaps nothing, even, if you can’t get over “Now Loading… Sky!” like many of us.

So why do I keep buying this stuff? I don’t know. It’s kind of like how I keep buying, say, Coca-cola. It’s just a common man’s drink, you know? It’s nothing special, but just pumped enough of sugar to make it inoffensive enough. It’s a known quality and a known quantity, in that you know what you’re getting.

Well, that’s pretty much just for plebs like myself. The rest of you can either move on or just look at the unboxing of the super-limited version of this album.

It has been forever since I did one of these. So, just a list of things to talk about–some I ordered, some I physically have, some I am thinking about of ordering. Some links with CDJ affiliated codes.

Third Planet – One thing that I like a lot about Sphere is their ability to put out an okay-sounding album despite being a gaggle of seiyuu idols that on paper didn’t seem like that they could. The two previous releases were so-so on average but they do grow on you, as opposed to a lot of the idol stuff that I just find outright repulsive and at best indifferent. I haven’t been excited about any Sphere singles since Now Loading Sky, so I’m going into it with a lot of caution. Hazy is probably the only bright spot for me. And just like last time, I’m going for the middle-tier instead of those crazy expensive sets.

The iDOLM@STER crap – Speaking of repulsive… I’m probably equally repulsed at my desire to purchase them and the quality of the music itself. I am able to keep my spending at bay largely because the two forces balance out each other. It’s not like there aren’t any iM@S music that is worth listening to, it’s just by and large this is not the case. If broducers out there think otherwise, I apologize, but I have no illusions. That said, comparatively speaking, the iM@S stuff at least have good production value. Between the DLCs and the sparse amount of music for purchase (often packaged in that low-value, suck-you-dry methods) I’ll probably buy very little. Also, I’m not really hooked into the marketing train for this and I don’t really keep track what is coming out besides the G4U discs and the DLCs.

Sakamichi no Apollon OST – I love the soundtrack. This is like what I wished Bebop would have been. White people jazz, man. The real question is, given how Watanabe and Kanno obviously know they can make good scratch from the music (and half of it are just improvs of existing songs!), how will they do it? A splashy web site just for the soundtracks? It’s really telling when they barely have that info in the “music” tab, leaving you to ponder if it’s worth buying Yuki’s single, more because of the trumpet solo and being penned by Kanno, instead of her signature screech. At least they’re giving some props to the drummer and pianist responsible for the in-anime pieces, which is great. I think the breakdown is that Kanno plays the keys for her compositions and Matsunaga Takashi plays the jazz standards. And what is up with that outtakes thing?

Red Planet – So from earth we go to mars, and Akino Arai is always a trustworthy source of moody stuff. This one reaches way back to Aria S3? I was never a fan of hers but I always thought highly of her music, so this is like, the one opportunity for purchase I probably shouldn’t pass up.

Owari no Wakusei no Love Song – Anyone like this? On paper this sounds like audio gold, but when I tried out the PVs none of them were particularly interesting. Seemed pretty much a waste of Nagi’s big guns. Nonetheless I am still kind of interested.

IA/01 – BIRTH – Speaking of weird things, I picked up that IA album. I mean, just in general: LIA in a can? That’s like, a chicken that lays golden goose eggs. And now you get this 4-disc set with a set of 2-disc IA mixes (half of it is just like your average vocaloid dance pump), a demo of IA, and then a disc of data from that delicious PV from Hosogane Takuya? This is good bang for the buck.

Birthday – ClariS’s first real album is just mostly a singles collection. Out of the new tracks there was one that I liked. But overall this is pretty solid dancy pop stuff that I can listen to for a long time. I like to think of tiny hats, partly because of this man, but more because it sums up the feeling when you listen to this crap. I think this album marks a precious moment in time in which this perfectly 2.5D mystery 2-person group captures the imagination of a bunch of people despite being nothing really extraordinary in themselves. Things can only go downhill from here, I think.

Aquarion EVOL OST – This is on the horizon, and it reads like the same Macross Frontier nonsense that Kanno and Kawamori cooked up back then–a bunch of vocal songs along with background tracks here and there. BLESS4 should provide eerie equivalence in terms of the approach to vocals as Mamegu and May’n–the FULL POWER TO ENGINES approach–except that there are dudes in the group, and that would be pretty cool for a change.

Petit Pas – This is more like a semi-mini-album with its play time, but it’s surprisingly good. I guess I went into it expecting the abyss, and it ended up being okay. It’s still a case where the voice is holding back the music more often than it is helping the music, I’m afraid. Maybe next time Aoi-chan. Actually this is kind of how I feel about both Hoshizora Destination and Sinfonia Sinfonia, except the former has pretty decent sounds thanks to Round Table-ness, working well with that sweet moe koe.

That Tell Your World single? It’s actually pretty good, which would explain how well it sold, Google ad not withstanding.

The two Chihayafuru OSTs are terrific. On one hand the tracks run the range necessary for a show that is quite exaggerated with both comedy and tension, on the other hand there’s this classy feel that the sound tries to maintain, making you feel all… 100 poets and what not the whole time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s still pretty good. It’s definitely one of the best, among solid, traditionally themed anime soundtrack available that I liked, in recent years.

Perhaps the most disappointed thing I heard lately is Artery Vein. In a way I didn’t expected much about it going in, as someone who never was quite wowed by Mingosu’s vocals; I didn’t come out with a better impression. I think KitaEri did admirably but the two together did not scratch any kind of itch. To put it in perspective though, it is still quite good for “seiyuu music.” I think the potential is there, they just need to get someone to write something good.

That’s it for now. There are probably some stuff that I left out, but oh well.