WagakkiBand – Strong Fate

As ways to start the new year go, a sold-out show at the Nippon Budokan ain’t bad, and that’s just how WagakkiBand kicked off their 2016 on January 6th. A week later, the band released a new digital single, Strong Fate, a song that will feature in Nakamura Yoshihiro’s forthcoming horror film “Zang-e -Sunde wa ikenai heya-”, to be released in Japan on January 30th.

Strong Fate sees WagakkiBand’s distancing themselves yet further from their VOCALOID roots. Composed by vocalist Suzuhana Yuko, the song also manages to resolve what’s become a recurring issue with the octet’s releases: the tendency of the modern instruments to drown out their traditional counterparts when the ensemble all play at once.

The solution seems to have been to concede that it won’t always be possible to give members a fair share of things to do on every song. As such, both Machiya’s guitar and Kaminaga Daisuke’s shakuhachi, the dominant instruments on most WagakkiBand compositions, are been sidelined in favor of Ninagawa Beni’s shamisen and Ibukuro Kiyoshi’s koto. The latter two alone provide accompaniment during the verses while Yuko’s vocal delivery freely alternates between conventional and “shigin” styles.

Fans of Ono Fuyimi’s award-winning novel could be forgiven for having doubts when they heard that WagakkiBand would be providing the official song for the film adaptation. However, it contains only traces of the deliriously energetic performance style for which the octet is known. Intro and outro aside, the rest of Strong Fate is a moody, slow-burning piece along the lines of Akatsuki no ito that may even disappoint fans of musical blitzkriegs like Senbonzakura and Ikusa. Suzuhana fans should have no such worries, though.

Strong Fate is available for purchase via iTunes, and a trailer for “Zang-e -Sunde wa ikenai heya-” featuring the song can be watched below: