Gunbuster hopefully requires no introduction. If it does, I weep for you, and wonder just how you managed to read all the preceding posts. In any event, perhaps one of the seminal giant robot anime, its opening is quintessentially 1980s, yet has aged rather well. Perhaps better than the woman who sang it; Noriko Sakai, of course, made headlines in 2009 with her involvement in a drug scandal. Japan is extremely intolerant of such things, and so this fairly well marked the end of her career.
In 1988, though, all that was far in the future. The present was full of lots and lots of synthesizers.
Active Heart is a song that would not look out of place in the discography of A-Ha or WHAM! Yes, it's that... perky? The introduction is definitely very bouncy, and would make a good workout track, if you have the proper tight pants and leg warmers. It's also not very long, with the drum beat to establish things, and the familiar chords from the keyboard.
Noriko's voice is rather light and airy, and not as obsessively cute as jpop has gotten, later on. This was long before the moe boom, and while having a woman sing the opening song for a proper, manly robot show might be a little off, well, the fact that the manly robot show had primarily female protagonists might have altered things a bit.
In any event, her voice mostly carries the song. There is the drum and bass underlying it, in a fairly intense beat, but that's almost all for the instrumentals during the actual singing; there's little to get in the way of her voice, aside from the occasional backing vocals.
As such, though, the song feels a bit thin in places. Part of this is its length; at 3 minutes 22 seconds, it's fairly short for a song. Part of this is that it's not an especially complex song; there are no instrumental heroics in this piece, as it has a very straightforward chord progression. The bridge is almost an afterthought, and it took me a few listenings to remember just where it fell. So no guitar solos.
For all that, it's not a bad song. It's just not a very good song. Written, as it was, at a time when anime openings were just those, openings, and not necessarily made to sell singles, that isn't so surprising. Still, it does pale a bit, when compared to later songs. On its own merits, though, it does what an anime song is intended to do, which is catch the ear. It just happens that the overall effect of this song is to sound as if the album length version is just something they had to come up with because they already had the OVA-length version laying around.
Three of five stars, mostly from nostalgia.
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