I realised I never said anything on here about Kalafina’s 2011 LP After Eden, despite going into the official shop in Shibuya and picking up a copy on release day. It’s a really nice record with some standout tracks, but looking back it sounds like it was trying too hard. It came out only a year after their previous full-length effort, so with that in mind I suspect that they were over-reaching themselves a bit and were suffering from the notorious ‘third album syndrome’.

Two years later, with their first European appearances under their belts, where do they stand with their fourth record? While AE took a few listens to get into, Consolation endeared it to me from the get-go. Quite honestly I don’t think they’ve sounded better – the songs on offer here are easily of the standard they set right back in ’09 with their debut Seventh Heaven.

I first heard the songwriting of Yuki Kajiura through the soundtrack to Koichi Mashimo’s Noir but for me her style became intrinsically linked to a certain visual aesthetic after the haunting Portrait de Petit Cossette. Kalafina, her current project, is best known as the vocal group behind the soundtrack to the Kara no Kyoukai films; my love for that series aside, the ‘Kalafina sound’ is instantly recognisable yet hard to categorise.

The fact that so many of their tracks are tie-ins to films and TV shows does carry an associated burden if you want to appreciate them on their own: the first LP, Seventh Heaven, is and always will be the Kara no Kyoukai vocal album to me but Red Moon follows a mere year behind with more album-only numbers in comparison. While it doesn’t quite scale the heights of, say, Oblivious or Aria, it’s still Kalafina. And these three girls can still sure as hell sing.

I’ve had a .flac version of Seventh Heaven on my HD for a while now but when I was in Akihabara I was able to pick up the legal version (I decided against the limited edition since I was worried about spending too much…). It has the prettiest CD inlay booklet I’ve seen in a long time but above all else it’s the neatest way of getting Kalafina’s best material on one shiny disc. In fact the only disappointing omission here for me is the Lacrimosa single and its B-side Gloria but it does include all the major vocal numbers from the Kara no Kyoukai movie series, plus a track or two that you won’t find on any of the OSTs.

Interestingly the group members and Yuki Kajiura, the songwriter behind it all, are reluctant to categorise the material, instead describing it simply as ‘Kalafina sound’; given the range of influences in evidence I can understand their point. Choral-gothic-synth-folk is a bit of a mouthful yet still doesn’t go all the way to summing up how the musical approach of, say, Uninstall (or any of Kajiura’s similar work so far) has progressed. It’s pleasantly surprising how wonderfully this collection of songs works on its own merits outside the BGM/film theme context: you certainly shouldn’t be discouraged if you’re not familiar with the anime that inspired it.