Overview

Hopeful Weeds is the name given to Yasunori Mitsuda's fan club. During the time period in which the fan club has been established, Yasunori Mitsuda has put out various volumes of CDs, each containing two tracks, for his fans' listening pleasure. Each of the volumes contains something stylistically different. Let's root through the weeds and see what lies ahead for the first volume! It consists of two tracks, "Hopeful Weeds" and "Air".

Body

The title track is quite a captivating piece. It starts off with a capella vocals chanting a beautiful melody. The vocals soon fade away leading into a mesmerizing piano melody with some light percussion accompaniment. The melody that the piano creates conjures up images of hope and solitude.

Halfway through the track, the vocals come back and mirror the piano melody. The acoustic guitar appears and causes the development of this track, while simple, to become stunning in the end. A great exclusive overall.

"Air," on the other hand, is treated on a music box. The melody in this piece is also very captivating, but suffers from lack of development due to the single instrument. It's also a bit repetitive. In the end, the first volume balances out to be above average. "Hopeful Weeds" is a very beautiful piece, and, while "Air" also demonstrates a bit of beauty, the lack of development causes it to be the weaker of the two tracks.

Summary

The Hopeful Weeds series is a very nice set of albums that Mitsuda produced for his fans. It really reflects two of his strengths, creating vocal themes and music box tunes. While you won't be able to buy this in any stores, if you do manage to track it down, definitely acquire it since the compositions are totally exclusive here.