Toradora! - Original soundtrack

Ever since Toradora! started airing, I've been waiting impatiently for its soundtrack to become available. It wasn't just the show's opening theme and its brilliantly catchy ability to bore its way into your head at any time of the night or day (and I've had the opening theme single for quite a while now anyhow) that had me sold, there were also several pieces of incidental music within the series itself that I was rather keen to get my hands on.


So, the Toradora! OST is now here, and I couldn't wait to give it a listen. Except, I soon discovered that it's a member of a rather common phenomenon with many soundtracks - It only really sounds good in the context of the episodes and their visuals. Shorn of the actual content of the anime, the tracks on this OST are fun and bouncy in their own way much of the time, but they simply don't work out of context. Even the tracks I was looking forward to owning unfettered by dialogue suddenly sounded flat and uninteresting.

Perhaps on a second listen in a different frame of mind I'll feel a little differently about it, but at the moment I'm going to have to put this one down as a "nice to have for completeness, but I won't be listening to it very much all" acquisition. Yet despite this, the opening theme still continues to hijack my brain and blare out its goodness day after day after day...