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Kamen Rider Die watches Kamen Rider Kiva
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05-06-2021, 05:53 PM
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13
Fish Sandwich
The Immortal King Tasty
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Every diner you've ever been to.
Posts: 3,833
Kiva is a show I have a bit of a weird connection to. I guess it's maybe relevant to give that personal context of me getting into Rider during OOO and – in contrast to what Switchblade just said about a couple years before that – I recall "Inoue is a washed up hack" being a fairly prominent opinion even in 2011, and while that didn't stop me from finding out fairly quickly that I'm a big fan of Faiz, it did mean there wasn't a lot pushing me toward watching Kiva. So for a very good while, I didn't watch it. It ended up being the second to last Heisei show I caught up on (Hibiki ended up going last, if you recall), and that was much later, while Gaim was airing. I'll hopefully have plenty to kick in about my opinions on the show proper as you go along, but before I get there, suffice it to say, Kiva was not a series that was calling out to me for whatever reason.
Except it's also been a constant presence for me ever since I became a Rider fan.
You see, Kiva is every bit as much about music as Hibiki was. Arguably
more
, even? This is glaringly apparent from the episode titles alone, which use
musical notation
instead of hyphens or whatever, as though the first word always being a musical reference wasn't enough. You'd kinda hope at that point they were taking the music in the show more seriously than usual, and I think they very much were. Kiva has a soundtrack that is full of absolute bangers, and I was listening to those theme songs ALL the time well before I sat down to watch the show they were produced for. In a way, I already felt very familiar with the show not even having yet seen it.
This stuff is legitimately formative for me, and that being the case, I knew that when you got around to making this thread, I wanted to pay tribute to that weird connection I have with Kiva by spotlighting all that high quality music in some way. Which is an excessively elaborate way to say I'm just going to try and make a point to talk about each song a bit as they come up. I mean, I know basically nothing about music, so even if I wanted to do something fancy here, I couldn't.
Naturally,
Break the Chain
is first up on that list, and hoo boy is this a good theme song. I mean, man, right from the title alone, it's just killing it. That's like the whole show in three words right there, which makes sense when it's pulled right from the tagline. And that extremely direct relation to what the series is about extends to the lyrics by Shouko Fujibayashi, a lyricist for a huge swath of Rider tunes who I find to be
very
good about that sort of thing. Break the Chain has this fun thing going on where it's pretty specifically being sung
at
the protagonist as much as the audience, rather than simply being sung
about
Wataru and the show, and I find this massively increases the punchiness of the song. The actual instrumentation is a mix of smooth harmonies and much more aggressive sounds, so it matches perfectly. It's a song that kinda gets up in your face and makes you like it, you know? Again, there's only so much I can do to describe the "why" here, but yeah, I really love this one. Just a total jam that always gets me pumped.
(I also might as well mention here that since the premiere was directed by Ryuuta Tasaki, I believe this is yet another case of the tight visuals of the opening being thanks to him.)
...Plus! While it was pretty specifically the
vocal
tracks that were filling my ears long before I watched the show, the BGM is every bit as fantastic. It seems the guy who composed it, Tsuneyoshi Saitou, has a background in classical music, and he makes it work so well here that it
pains
me this is the only toku show he's ever done. The only reason I don't call this guy a favorite composer for me is because I know it would hurt to get too attached.
Still though, that one toku soundtrack is maybe all you need when you nail it that hard on the first go. There's naturally a heavy emphasis on strings throughout, which is very thematically appropriate and all, but I mean, why bother even attempting to explain why it's good when I can just put this right below and tell you it's merely Kiva's normal, regular battle theme you hear all the time:
Anyway, always good to see another one of these from you, Die! I look forward to the Somwhere In Spring To Eventually Summer of Inoue!
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