FLCL Season 1 Musical Breakdown
Overall, I believe that season 1 of FLCL is drastically greater than the latter seasons for many different reasons, but I won’t go through all of them in great detail. Personally, I would go so far as to say that season 2 (FLCL: Progressive) and season 3 (FLCL: Alternative) do the entire franchise a disservice in how they don’t live up to the technical marvels and the musical precision displayed in season 1 (FLCL).
On this go-‘round I saw that generally, FLCL is jam-packed with music and inundates the viewer with songs that encompass different aspects of The Pillows’ musical variety. What I would do is view episode 1 of FLCL, episode 1 of Progressive, and episode 1 of Alternative consecutively and annotate when the musical cues occur, and the data shows that there is actually more music and a larger variety of music in season 1.
Excluding the ending theme “Ride on Shooting Star,” the 6 episodes of FLCL season 1 have an average of 8.3 songs per episode. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say that each episode has 8 songs, each song being around 2 minutes long, that means you are hearing music for 16 minutes of a 25-minute episode, which means that you are being inundated with music for almost 60% of a single episode. By music, I mean songs, full-on songs with lyrics that you can download to your phone and run 5 miles to (or maybe that is just me). Contrast that with other anime of the current times that do not have dedicated rock bands lending their entire albums to a 6-episode OVA series, and instead have double or nearly triple the amount of episodes and rely on mostly instrumentals and maybe a few lyrical songs that are used in very specific cases to where you can just about predict when the song with the lyrics show up. When thinking about other anime series, comparatively, FLCL does so much more with so little, and it pays off dramatically.
The most dominant tone in the music is the form of songs that fluctuate between slow and quick-paced hard rock songs that build tension or other scores that underscore the zany action scenes and explosive comedic moments. Even so, there are uses of slow and melodic love songs, and upbeat indie songs that utilize both the lyrical and instrumental versions to underscore the romantic tension between characters and give insight to their perspective on the world around them, cementing themselves as staples of who these characters are and where they fit in this grand scheme of a town named Mabase where apparently, nothing amazing ever happens.
