The Singles Jukebox

The Jukebox takes on (part of) a manga-anime-mobile game multimedia monster…

[Video][Website]
[6.17]

Dorian Sinclair: Roselia exist in a weird quasi-fictional space as one of the bands featured in the BanG Dream! franchise (most notably the BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! rhythm game). The band members are not real people — but the songs are, and the voice actresses perform them live. Here’s the thing though: in the rhythm game, songs are kept quite strictly under 2:30. And a song that is tight and propulsive for two and a half minutes can start to feel a little aimless when stretched to twice that length. I think “R” is at its core a pretty great song, there’s just too much of it.
[6]

Anna Suiter: You know when something niggles at the back of your mind because it sounds familiar but you can’t place it? At first I thought this was because Roselia was the name of a Pokemon, but it’s actually because I opened BanG Dream! for 10 minutes once and Roselia was the name of a band there. This song? It’s not bad by any means, and if I didn’t know it came from an anime adjacent property I probably wouldn’t guess at it either. It’s hard to determine the trajectory of any group that comes out of something like this either, but for now this is more than passable. I’d be more curious if they’d ever be allowed to have any growth, though.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Video games out of Rush and New Order, piano solo, a sense of hysteria as lived-in experience — I can dig this.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: “R” is frenetic and yet sturdy, its pepped-up synth attack bolstered by a muscular bassline that rumbles like hard rock. It makes for an unexpected contrast, reminiscent of the way Babymetal, for instance, combines guitar flash and idol fervor, but a deflating one: rather than create tension, each element keeps the other in check. The resulting single is too leaden to really unleash the chaos and too peppy to grow into something grander.
[4]

Iain Mew: At this stage any possibility of a conflict between the idol pop and the goth rock is completely gone. It’s just one more flavour which can be added to distinguish one particular fictional group from your multimedia stable of them, and a good flavour for it as well — explosive synth pep lends itself incredibly well to the baroque. So the split that keeps “R” from being more isn’t between genres. It’s just that it has so many different urgent ideas in there but no chorus to make them cohere.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: In the world of music-centered anime franchises, the two giants of the decade are K-On! and Love Live!. The first is the story of a freewheeling “light music club” that sings songs about buildings and food and has little ambition beyond next year’s school festival. The latter takes place in a universe where “school idols” are a big enough phenomenon to shut down Times Square. High-spirited pop is the norm for both, and when the songwriters veer away from this light and fluffy norm, the disconnect can be jarring. BanG Dream!, while often marked as derivative, seeks to mend this issue by divvying up its discography among five distinct groups. Roselia, the band of brooding and serious professionals, is allowed to fully inhabit its identity in “R,” which acts as a statement of purpose and a showcase for its members’ prodigious talents. Each member has a solo singing part, and no element sounds overpowering or out of place — a particular accomplishment given the tumultous nature of the voice acting industry. A verse or two could stand to be cut, though; perhaps this was overcompensation for a mobile game which cuts off songs around the two-minute mark.
[7]