Review Summary: Well, here's another great moment in the legend of Spike, famous bounty hunter and dog walker.
As the Seatbelts' first album led off with "Tank!", the show opener, one glaring omission from the original soundtrack was the show's closer. Now here she is in all her glory; kicking off this EP is "The Real Folk Blues", which borrows its intro and descending bassline and chord progression from The Verve's "Weeping Willow" but builds upon it through the addition of a highly characteristic trumpet riff, distorted backing guitar, and much heavier overall feel. Its lyrics are beautifully tragic, and Mai Yamane belts them out with a passion and soul that truly resonates. Clocking in at 6:17, this track has tremendous weight that it carries well, never dragging or becoming over-long. This is alt rock at its finest, besting even the radio hits of the day.
Track 1 is the reason most people will buy the album, but the rest of it is surprisingly solid. "The Odd Ones" is typical Cowboy Bebop jazz fare, much as you'd hear on the first album, but it stands among the best of The Seatbelts' repertoire. It's also one of the most underrated tracks in their repertoire, as it doesn't carry the association of any iconic scene from the show and isn't the first track to spring to mind when you think Cowboy Bebop. In a similar vein is the short "SPY", which conveys a mysterious James Bond-type melody laid out smoothly and symmetrically around an explosion of brass and excellent bass-work in the mid-section, suggesting action and alarm. Both of these tracks make for great listening.
"Fantaisie Sign" is sweet and smooth electropop diverging into a wild alto sax solo at the 2:25 mark. Its ambient background synths and crooning female vocals (with lyrics in French, no less!) juxtapose with the rapid-fire drum machine beats that reach a head in the final minute when the drums crescendo, the pace picks up, the vocals distort, and the sax returns to wail amid the confusion. It's a highly unusual track that takes a couple listens to get used to, but once you do it's quite rewarding.
The rest of the tracks are pure novelties. "Doggy Dog" is tribal drums and clapping with ridulous lyrics about actually being dogs, embodied in the howling and chanting of "We are the doggy doggy dogs!" repeated throughout. "Cats on Mars" is Ed's theme, a simple but bizarre electropop tune that fits the definition of levity. And finally, with a warm and gentle piano roll that you're guaranteed to recognize, it all comes to the perfect denouement of "Piano Bar I" ... Or so you thought! A secret bonus track, identified in tiny print buried in the liner notes as "Black Coffee", is a weird timpani and woodwinds jazz piece--complete with a silly false start--punctuated by the hilarious dialogue of a man desperately trying to get a girl to have some coffee with him. The novelty songs aren't entirely up to par with the better material, but they're no slouches either.
With the exception of "The Real Folk Blues", which is absolute perfection,
Vitaminless is by far the goofiest of the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack albums. But in that goofiness lies the heart and soul of Cowboy Bebop, and taken as a whole this EP is simply stellar.
See You Space Cowboy ...
