The thing that hits you when you first listen to the Samurai Deeper Kyo soundtrack is the aggressiveness of the music. The majority of the early tracks come right at you with a solid electric guitar attack, reminiscent of heavy metal rock. This fits a show about a demonic samurai with lots of fighting and killing. Not all of the tracks are like this, though. Once you get past the first few tracks, the album is mostly synthesizer numbers, though some of these also tend towards a heavy, aggressive sound. Some of these tracks are attempts to emulate a symphonic orchestra, and some are your normal synthesizer weirdness that tends to show up in anime from time to time. As the album progresses, the aggressiveness of the music drops off noticeably, and you end up feeling let-down. There is a reason that most albums don't put all the aggressive music up front, because you get the listener revved up and then bore them or put them to sleep as the music tones down.

Unfortunately, as much as I enjoy guitars (I play one myself), a few good guitar tracks can't save this album from itself. While the music does a good job of supporting the action in the show, when collected as an album the music has a disjointed feel and things just don't flow properly from one track to another. There is an art to putting together a soundtrack album, and whoever put this album together has not mastered that art. Aggressive tracks move into pensive tracks which move into foreboding tracks which move back into aggressive tracks, with no rhyme or reason to it, other than a distinct lack of the aggressive tracks in the back end of the album. From the placing of some of the non-background tracks (opening theme up front, eyecatch in the middle, closing theme at the end), I get the impression that the intent was to arrange the music like it would be encountered in an episode of the show. If that is actually the case, then this show has many slow elements to it, but I think it is more a factor of the producer not getting things right.

Another of the things that really bugged me about this album was the very generic feeling that came from the synthesizer tracks. I kept getting flashbacks to every Japanese console RPG I have played over the last few years, especially in the original PlayStation days when you didn't have as good audio quality as we have today. There is just nothing original about this music. If you have much experience with anime or console RPGs, you have heard most of it before.

That being said, there are some enjoyable tracks right near the middle of the album. Track 10, "Hearts," is an enjoyable acoustic guitar duo, with some light piano backup. It is a nice track to listen to, but it feels somewhat out of place on this album, as it is surrounded by darker sounds. Track 11, "First Death March," is an excellent example of the better electric guitar tracks on the album. It is marred by some questionable synthesizer sounds in the middle, but nothing that power chords can't overcome. Lastly, to prove that not all synthesizer compositions are bad, track 13, "Sad Story," is actually quite enjoyable, with lots of orchestral emulation, and an actual emotional feel, which is sadly lacking in most of the album. You can tell that someone enjoyed composing this one.

After that, the album devolves into generic sounds and I can't really recommend any particular tracks. Unless this is your first anime soundtrack experience, you have heard it all before. I also noted that while both the opening and ending theme were included, only the TV edits are on the album. If you're interested in getting the full versions of these songs, a vocal album for the show was released in Japan. On the graphic design front, the packaging for the album is very minimal, especially compared to some of the other recent releases by Geneon. The only extra in the cover booklet is lyrics to the opening and closing theme songs, in both romanized form and a full English translation. At least the back of the booklet includes a nice montage of various characters from the show.

In the end, your enjoyment of this album is probably directly related to how much you liked the show. Even then, this album is only recommended for serious fans, or people looking for a very generic anime soundtrack.