Ever watch a show and love it for its music as well? I think I'm like that with Witch Craft Works, which is one of my more recent favorites (probably my favorite from 2014, if I write up a year-end list). I've been listening to the OST over and over again for a while now, especially CD 1 (CD 2 is good, too, but the last several songs on the 1st are quite good). One stand out is this song:
Witch Craft Works OST: "Walpurgisnacht"
I'm not sure how many times I've listened to it, but I still haven't gotten over it. In a way, the symphonic songs on the OST, like this one, kind of reminds me of James Newton Howard's work on Signs, and even parts of the score to both The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises (the former done by both Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, while Zimmer did the latter alone).
TECHNOBOYS PULCRAFT GREEN-FUND did the soundtrack, but it was the member Tomohisa Ishikawa who wrote the arrangements for the songs with strings. I wonder if he had listened to Howard's and Zimmer's work before working on his own parts for the Witch Craft Works OST? In Signs, anyone who has seen it will remember one certain musical motif which reoccurs throughout the film. It's a 3-note figure which rises and falls. In Witch Craft Works, Ishikawa does something similar with its own motif of an descending 3-note figure. It's regularly heard whenever the two main characters Kagari and Honoka are on screen, almost like it's hinting at a trinity of sorts (which, if you've seen the anime, then it does make sense).
In the song I've posted, "Walpurgisnacht", you can hear faintly hear it, but it's not as pronounced in this song, which moves along at a quick pace. The percussion, here too, recalls Howard's work for the film Collateral, which used extensive percussion during the chase scene near the end. Yet, this song reminds me most of some of Zimmer's work on both Dark Knight films. While The Bat had his own motif, a 2-note figure, the Joker has his own, a very drawn out, scratchy, rising 1-note figure. In a way, if Batman had been a witch and Bane and the Joker were also witches, then I bet the soundtrack would have sounded similar to Ishikawa's work on Witch Craft Works (Weekend has her own insane Joker-like streak, too, both with their love of reckless explosions and chaos inducing grand schemes). Just listen to how "Walpurgisnacht" drives along at a brisk tempo, strings flitting in and out toward the beginning, then how it suddenly quiets down to a choir-like sound around 1:45 and again but even more so at 2:30. All in all, this a very good song from a soundtrack which itself is pretty good overall.
It's even better when listened to with the volume cranked up! You won't know if you should don a cape and fight crime, or grab your broom and fight a crazy witch who enjoys making things go boom.
