The Kids on the Slope: Original Soundtrack includes 24 tracks of background music and songs that were performed during the course of the series. Yoko Kanno was the driving force behind the music for the series, and her work is as solid as it always is.

Kids on the Slope: Original Soundtrack
Publisher: Epic Records
Release Date: April 25, 2012

The standout tracks are the songs that were performed during the series, and most of those are included on this disc. The main exception would be the two rock and roll songs performed by the band that Seiji forms for the cultural festival. These two songs appear on a second CD of music that was released for Kids on the Slope.

“Moanin’,” the first song that Kaoru and Sentaro play together, is such a catchy piece. After every time I hear it, it gets stuck in my head for a while. On the tracks with vocals (“But Not For Me,” “My Favorite Things,” and “Lullaby of Birdland”), the Japanese singers do a pretty good job of singing the English lyrics. I’m sure it can’t be easy to sing a song that’s not in your native language, so I really have to applaud them for not only doing it, but for the effort they must have put into singing words that aren’t in their native language.

Some of the background music is very memorable from the series, such as “Kids on the Slope,” “Satin Doll,” “Yurika,” “Curandelo,” “Transparent,” “Jazz For Button,” and “Milestones.” While I don’t immediately recognize all of the background music on the disc, they are all good tracks.

Back when I was in college, I spent two years as a DJ for the school’s 10,000 watt FM jazz radio station, and that experience helped me to acquire an appreciation for jazz music. There are some tracks on this CD that I could have heard the station playing during its daytime rotation, and hearing them brought back memories of the years I spent at the station.

Yoko Kanno did a great job of interpreting the jazz standards that appeared in Kids on the Slope, and she also brought some of the mechanics and feel of jazz into a number of her original compositions for the series.

This is a very well done anime soundtrack CD. Not only is there a lot of great material on it, the soundtrack itself is sequenced in such a way that it never feels like it’s dragging at any point when you’re listening to it.

In my opinion, this soundtrack CD is a “must get” for fans of Kids on the Slope who enjoy the music, as well as fans of Yoko Kanno’s music. However, this soundtrack has not been released in North America, so you’ll need to look for it at sites that sell Japanese import CDs and try to find the best deal.

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