When I watched Fate/stay night a couple years ago I remember thinking that some of the background music was pretty cool. The composer, Kenji Kawai, has done music for some other shows that I enjoyed, so it didn't surprise me that there was some good stuff here. When I first got this album I had some high hopes for it. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations.

At first blush, I can't even really pinpoint one specific reason why this album doesn't consistently hit high marks. The musicianship is good, and there is a good variety to the tracks on the album, but it just never really comes together to form a cohesive whole. This bothered me until I read the liner notes in the CD cover booklet. At that point, it became clear.

In the notes, the composer wrote that the Sound Director dictated that he wanted a Celtic sound to the music. Later, the director wanted one part of the show to have a "spaghetti western" feel, and the music needed to match. That, by itself, could cause problems (Celtic spaghetti western music? Good luck with that.), but the most important thing, in my opinion, is the fact that Fate/stay night began as a computer game, with a completely different composer. Kenji Kawai specifically notes that it would be "...meaningless if I composed something similar to the original, so I focused on how I could take over from the way it was in the original." Thus, we end up with a total of four creatives dictating terms to one degree or another. While Kenji Kawai appears to have the final say, I think that the dis-unity of vision hurts the cohesiveness of the album.

The structure of the album doesn't help, either. To once again quote Kenji Kawai from the liner notes, "The order of the pieces on the soundtrack does not reflect the order of the episodes; we assembled the music by shuffling in a sense of the order designed for the album." 'A sense of the order designed for the album?' What order is that? I can't detect any real order to this album, other than the fact that the opening theme comes first and the ending theme comes last. Other than that, it is a total mix of tracks, without any real sense of theme or pacing.

For example, let's pick a random track in the album, track 11, Stained Clouds. This is a melancholy, yet quite nice, instrumental piece with a mix of piano, oboe, and strings. Track 12 is a peppy keyboard and guitar piece. Track 13 is a moody and atmospheric piece that leaves the listener uneasy. Track 14 uses heavy synth sounds to provide an unearthly feeling, like floating in the aether. Track 15 sees another visit from the oboe, once again in support of a fairly melancholy number.

What do these tracks have in common? Some common instrumentation, definitely, but not much else. Other soundtrack albums that don't follow the order in which tracks are used chronologically in the show often have some kind of theme that they use to organize the tracks on a soundtrack album, but I can't find any evidence of that here. I can't figure out what the organizational scheme is, if in fact there is one.

Another aspect that works against this album is the brevity of the tracks. A significant majority of the tracks are between 1:30 and 2:15 in length. This is generally just long enough to build up momentum before the track ends and the next, usually thematically unrelated, track begins. The result is that the album does not build up any feeling of rhythm or flow. While shorter tracks most likely work well for supporting the action in the TV show, they don't support just listening to an album filled with little else. Even the opening and closing themes, being TV edits, fit this pattern. One notable exception to this is track 38, La Sola, a song sung in Italian, which runs almost four minutes in length. This is a nice song, neatly capturing the overall emotional feel of the show. It is too bad that it comes after over an hour of randomness.

In the end, Fate/stay night A.OST is not a bad album, but it is also not a good one. It includes a number of really enjoyable pieces of music, but it never really comes together as a cohesive whole. I can not recommend this album for general listening, but if you are a big fan of the show, you may find enough stuff you like here to warrant a purchase.