Bad Luck’s lead singer and Lyricist, Shuichi Shindo, is in a slump, unable to come up with any new lyrics for the band as his mind is distracted by Yuki's, his friend and lover, distance. Matters are made worse after Shuichi has boasted to the press about the strength of his next set of lyrics, so the band can’t even employ anyone else to fill the gap...

Gravitation: Lyrics of Love is a two episode OVA which predated the series. The show was directed by Shininchi Watanabe and is a ‘yaoi’ anime, that is to say that it is a gay themed romance show designed to appeal to a female audience.

For a show which is supposed to be a romance there is very little romantic about it. The whole of the first episode has Shuichi flopping about not being able to write and thinking about his lover. The two don’t even get together, except in one dream sequence. The second episode opens with Shuichi still devoid of any lyrics and to make his life even more ghastly his lover is writing lyrics for a rival band. So what do think? Will Shuichi get it together in time for the gig? Well of course he does, but by that time I had lost any real interest in the narrative.

The animation is okay but not great. The show does try to have a nice balance of comedy and romance, but this mostly reduces down to Shuichi whinging. Audio is either in English or Japanese 2.0 with subtitles. For the uninitiated the extras should be a font of knowledge. You get a gallery, but more important are eight pages of liner notes and eight pages looking at the difference between the manga and the anime. There are two short sneak previews - to be honest these are both static images with a voice over - in the end though there was not enough information to determine what exactly it was previewing. They are funny as the subtitles almost universally fail to match the English dub. The extras are wrapped up with a textless opening and closing sequence and a couple of trailers.

I think you have to be a real fan of the show to fork out nearly sixteen quid for what boils down to two episodes - a very low bang for bucks rating there. There is a lot of whining and not a lot of romance and the story moves barely above a snail’s pace.

5

Charles Packer