The three latest music CDs just arrived - to my surprise, they came in a 4x7x24 inch box, sort of an odd form factor for three CDs, but it turns out CDJapan threw in a free poster of the Vol 4 art on one side and Vol 5 on the other. Nice of them.
Of the new CDs, the Saikyo Pare Parade (new radio themes) probably has the best songs; I like the new opening with its four key changes in four measures :-)
The character singles will take a few more listens to rate well. Meanwhile, as I mentioned a while back, all these versions of Hare Hare Yukai based on the same instrumental track allow some funny tricks with combining those tracks. For instance, for those of you with a 5.1-speaker PC setup,
here's a 10-second WMA Professional clip where each channel has different character singing (almost) a-capella.
Edit: Hahahahaha... ok, it only took me a day of listening to Saikyo Pare Parade to get the joke clued by the Morse key that opens it: The basic rhythym of the piece, started by the first line of singing, is . . . - - - . . . or "SOS" :-)