Guess I'll look forward to reading an in-depth review of Gurren Lagann's OST from a non-watcher's point of view, whenever that comes. Well, all that I've told you about it is clouded by bias since it's one of my favourite series.

Gotta agree, Black Cat's score was....pedestrian. And the show was even worse.

If you haven't been a fan of his recent work(Soul Eater, Kekkaishi, and Gurren Lagann) with the intense rocking sound, I think you might be surprised at the balance he manages to strike between his old and new sounds in Gurren Lagann. The rocking tracks have distinctive melody and the orchestral tracks have rapping accompaniment that fits to a T.

Personally my favourite Iwasaki OST is GetBackers', though the show isn't good, the soundtrack makes for good standalone listening with regards to standard shounen fare. And then comes Gurren Lagann's, even though I like his orchestral stuff way better as well, simply because I feel that the well-balanced product of his two sounds reveals something that's very special, and definitely beyond the sum of its parts.

Though for the love of Haruhi, please do watch the series instead of making its soundtrack a standalone listen.

No problem, it's always nice to spread the KOKIA love. As a little tidbit, the 7-minute version you found was the one that played while the credits were rolling (and it went very well with the imagery IMHO), while mine is the standard version, with both included in the single that she released for the movie.

I need to find that soundtrack and give it another listen...

The "casual fans" I was referring to are the kind that buy anime in Best Buy. I could see them buying, say, Baccano!, because it's got a substantial amount of "action," and it has an American setting. Oh! Edo Rocket just seems "too Japanese" to me to be successful in overseas markets, but you never know.

I think it's quite a funny and inventive show, with deeper themes about freedom of expression and individualism. There is also some material about social status and discrimination, particularly with regards to the artisan class which apparently fell near the bottom of the scale in this historical period.

Oh, and both Coil and Nodame Cantabile are in my signature, but it hasn't had the desired effect as of yet!

Glad you're enjoying the Rocket soundtrack. I don't know if you saw the show itself, which was a satirical story of repression in an anachronistic 1840's Edo with modern and fictional technologies. If not, you'll have to wait awhile now since it was recently licensed by Funi in one of the strangest licensing decisions I've seen. Other than the fact that the heroine, Sora, looks like a Eureka clone, I don't see many things in this show that will attract the casual anime fan. Since they recently chose to distribute Baccano!, along with picking up a couple of Geneon properties like Saiunkoku Monogatari, I'm beginning to wonder if Funi is basing its licensing choices on which series show up in my signature!

Well, to be simplistic, I always saw Higurashi as bit of a 26 episode Kaede-arc. So, imagine having two episodes of Higurashi in Shuffle!, and I think you just about get the picture.

This is probably the best place to do this discussion, since the site's comment system is used so rarely I'm not sure I'm comfortable using it to have a discussion about anime.

My rating for Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu had nothing to do with the discussions we had on this forum, but I do admit I was originally going to give it a higher rating. Two things changed my mind. When I re-read over my review, I had realized just how negative I'd been about it and I could no longer justify to myself that it was worthy of a higher rating. The second thing is that when I compared it to all the other series that I'd given a "Below Average" rating, I realized that I thought all of them were better than NHnH. So I gave it "Poor". I decided it was the most fair thing to do. But it probably could have gone either way.