I am pimping a thing, because I love it so. :(
Once upon a time, there was a man named Revo, who started his own doujin band and called it Sound Horizon. It started relatively small, releasing self-produced CDs at conventions that were primarily instrumentals that told stories, but didn't have vocals. Along the way, though, it picked up actual singers, and Revo himself started singing parts (usually the main male lead of a given story). Sound Horizon (nicknamed SanHora) eventually grew in popularity and star power, to the point where actual seiyuu that the casual anime fan would recognize (Midorikawa Hikaru, Ohtsuka Akio, etc) began to have speaking(/singing) roles. They do lives and they have concerts where they have costumes and sets and act out the stories of individual albums. To date, they have seven full albums, the most recent being Märchen. I have been a fan forever, but the seventh album is the one I want to talk about, SO I AM GOING TO. :(
First:
イドへ至る森へ至るイドThen:
MärchenAt its core, these two albums tell the story of a murdered boy who, through the power of his mother's love (for him) and hate (for the world) conducts revenge plays for those who die unjustly, which in turn gives birth to the scenarios of several well-known fairytales (specifically Hansel and Gretel, The Hanged Man From The Gallows, Snow White, Mother Hulda, Sleeping Beauty, and Bluebeard). As the seventh full album, Märchen follows the seven deadly sins, the stories of seven unjustly-killed women, progressing from twilight to dawn.
There are translations for IdoIdo and Märchen on
Anime Lyrics as well as a different translator for videos on
YouTube (this is the first song; the rest are in the sidebar).
( NOW I WILL BE LONG-WINDED )Anyway the albums are kind of fantasy-rock in style, with random bits of jazz, pop, snippets of Vocaloid (Miku sings Elise's parts, though an actress does the speaking role), and also Ode to Joy and In The Hall Of The Mountain King.
:(b