Fullmetal Alchemist #1:
The Curse

100 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 02/08/2005
Reviewed: 05/03/2005

If you're anything like me you don't leave the house without your mp3 player. Once I was on the bus, rocking to out the seminal tunes of Bikini Kill (Rebel Girl, I believe it was), when my battery crapped out on me. I broke down and cried right there, right in front of a group of people mostly comprised of heroin addicts just back from the methadone clinic. That's how much I love my music!

Throughout anime you have your ups and downs where soundtracks are concerned. There's plenty of stuff like Yuki Kajiura's .hack or Yoko Kanno's Macross Plus (or Cowboy Bebop if you must be SO plebeian about it). There's also plenty of stuff like... pretty much every other soundtrack that sucks because it wasn't made by one of those two women. Yes, there's tons of ups and downs. There's song like Heats from Shin Getter Robo (the elder) that totally pumps you up to kill some aliens from space and there's songs like Dirty Pair Flash's Endless Answer that are like phoenixes rising from the ashes of their inexplicably crappy shows.

Kesenai Tsumi, The Inerasable Sin, is such a song that makes you perk your ears up when you listen to it. I can say to you with absolute honestly that this singular song has accounted for something like 40-60% of my music listening experience over the past week. Every time I walk outside, every time I trundle home from a bar at 3 am, every time I head onto the balcony for a cigarette... you can be sure as hell that the dulcet vocals of Nana Kitade followed me out. It was as if the Jesus himself was throwing down loaves of manna from heaven and I was scarfing them up with a giant plastic trash bag of love. The manna was the song, the trash bag was MY EARS.

It all starts out so unassuming. If I had to liken it to anything I would say that it was a good version of Silent City from Agent AIka. A song that beings by being real soft and slow and then all of a sudden breaks out in some wicked, melodramatic yelling for no reason at all. This is the sort of song where you want to put exclamation points every other word, sometimes three to a word just so you're denoting the proper emphasis the singer puts out(!!!)! Conspicuously unlike the Silent City is the fact that Kesenai Tsumi doesn't turn to total crap after forty seconds and make you want to rip your eyeballs out just to spite the song.

If you're listening to Silent City I advise you to not rip your eyeballs out, however, as then you won't be able to find the remote and turn off your stereo!

Those of us listening to Kesenai Tsumi do not have that problem. If I found myself in a position where I had no eyes and the stereo was on repeat I wouldn't mind it one single bit. Five times, ten times, fifty times. It's all good! I'm willing to make a pretty solid wager that this song is so good that the laser would burn through the CD before I got tired of listening to it. When those guitar hits are coming fast and strong you don't have a care in the world. When the distortion cleared and the chick busts out with the hotness, it's better than sex. Doubt my cohunes on the subject? Well you need only test me! Just make sure to bring your change purse, little lady, because I play for keeps.

I am quickly becoming convinced that Kesenai Tsumi is indeed the perfect song, that I may never need to listen to another song again. It's the type of song that one sits down to and envisions how it would be played if they ever got their J-Pop cover band together. Oh man, Jerry Garcia on lead guitar, myself on the bass, some whacky punk chick screaming out the vocals and hey, there's Bare on the keyboards! Who knew such a thing could ever be so perfect? Who knew that such happiness could come packaged in a bundle only 4'14 minutes long. I'm a simple man, with simple tastes, but a week ago at two in the morning I came home from a bar and found Kesenai Tsumi on the TV and waiting for me with open arms. This song offers a kind of love that asks nothing in return.

Oh yeah. The show's pretty alright too.