Time to get messy with it. Here on the Cosmia blog we’ve talked about a lot of anime-adjacent media, but I’ve never published a blog directly about an anime before. With this blog post I’m changing that. For a somewhat under the radar show from 2017 called Anonymous Noise. Why this show? Well… basically I’m participating in a sort of “you watch this thing and I watch that thing” sort of deal, and I decided to put my thoughts on a show I watched for it in this blog so here we are. I like music, I like complicated drama, and I often enjoy romance shows, so this one seemed promising. However, I also knew going into it that it’s not exactly highly acclaimed. So does this show hit the right notes or should it have stayed in the demo? As per usual I don’t have a short answer to that question. Truth is I’ve got mixed feelings about it. So if you’re interested I’m going to spend the rest of this blog unpacking my diverging thoughts on the matter.

If you’re hoping for a spoiler free review then uhhh… sorry that’s not happening. It’s a messy ass show but it’s got passion. Also the music’s pretty dope. There, that’s your spoiler-free review. At the time I’m writing this I’ve only seen the anime. I’ve learned the gist of how the love triangle resolves in the manga though I’m not going to directly talk about it because I haven’t read it. Reader’s discretion is advised. Got it? Got it.

The Premise

One thing you’ll know watching the show is that it has uh, quite the eventful first episode. It’s common practice to use that initial episode to get the general point across. Show the audience why they should keep watching. That’s perfectly fine. What’s less fine is how damn hectic everything is in this case. Gotta get the whole premise in there, whether it fits comfortably or not dammit!

So we kick things off with our designated MC-chan of the show singing her lalala’s to the ocean. It’s not exactly the most gripping piece of music you hear in this show, but after hearing it enough times it’s pretty stuck in my head any way. If you’ve seen the show you probably know what I mean. She do be la’ing. Nino has been singing for most of her life, though she has no professional training and she’s emotionally tumultuous to say it simply. A raw talent if you will. I’m sure the voice actress herself got some serious training but whatever. How does one tame your voice to sound untamed? I don’t know, but it seems like she figured it out.

So the thing with Nino is she has a specific reason to sing, a reasons that goes beyond just loving singing even though she clearly does. She wants her voice to reach her childhood friend, a guy she’s in love with in spite of not seeing for 6 years. And the song she’s singing? Well, that was composed by a guy she met soon after the guy she has a crush on disappeared from her life. They got along for some time. Then this other guy drew her a whole ass composition in the sand and dipped. Except now all parties involved are in high school, and Nino just so happens to see that second guy perform with his light music club. Which sounds like a setup for a heartfelt reunion but this second guy, Yuzu, seemingly wants nothing to do with her initially. He tells her to stop talking to him and then revokes that within the same episode. The truth is he actually does have a thing for her, but he’s well aware that she has a thing for another dude so he felt it easier to distance himself initially. Meanwhile Nino may not be so invested in Yuzu’s love because she’s locked in on Momo, but she’s certainly enamored with his songs.

Meanwhile there’s another girl that heads the light music club band at the start of this show, but she quits in the first episode because she has a crush on Yuzu and gets jelly seeing him sing with Nino. So she’s like fuck it this isn’t my band any more. The problem is the light music club has another show to put on, and they’re already in hot water because Yuzu dipped mid set last time after seeing Nino. So Nino has to sub in and become the new vocalist pretty much immediately and it works out somehow. They’ve even got legit concert lighting on their high school stage.

As much as I wonder how the hell they got professional quality concert lighting at a high school stage it sure makes for some cool visuals. Seems like this particular school has some investment in music so maybe that’s why? Probably. Everything I mentioned here is stuff that you learn in the first episode. It’s pretty hard to follow because it all happens at breakneck speed and I didn’t really get what her Momo thing’s all about initially, but they make that abundantly clear later. Thankfully the rest of the episodes have less ridiculous pacing. As for the drama? Well, that part doesn’t get any less wild later on but we’ll unpack that in due time.

So we’ve got lots of music, lots of longing, and… yeah that’s most of the show right there. I didn’t even mention the blonde guy in the band has the thing for the original light music club singer, but she has a thing for Yuzu and thinks the blondie’s advances are just jokes so… rip that guy I guess. The drummer’s pretty much the only character in this high school band cohort that doesn’t have an unrequited love interest. He’s just there to be chill and be the drummer because bands kinda need them. And that’s the entirety of what I’ll say about that dude. I’ve got plenty to say about certain other characters though.

Nino Arisugawa, A.K.A. Alice

You know, I made a discovery while I was checking the spelling for MC-chan’s name. This girl’s voiced by Saori Hayami¹. As someone who’s rather fond of her work, I feel a bit embarrassed that I needed to check online to figure this out. Clearly my fan levels are lacking. Though looking at it another way, this is an example of Hayamin having more range than you’d initially think. I sometimes wondered if the VA for the talking parts and singing were the same person. I was impressed a VA could do singing like that. Though I also noticed it doesn’t really sound like a high schooler singing, which isn’t something I’d consider a serious issue any way. Anime’s full of grown women playing high schoolers so that’s nothing new. It’s just that when I learned she’s voiced by Saori Hayami the whole thing suddenly made more sense. I didn’t know she could sing like that, but I totally believe she could. She can go from the shy girl to the punk rock singer putting her heart on the line in the same episode just fine because she’s just that good.

Any ways, if I gush too much about Hayamin I’m going to lose sight of the actual matter at hand. Though I confess learning that info made my fondness of the character grow a non-trivial amount. So yes she’s got an excellent seiyuu that really helps sell it, but let’s focus more on the Nino gal besides that. So she’s a shoujo protagonist, and that information alone comes with some connotations. They’re usually designed to be someone a girl reading can see themselves as. Usually normal-ish but not super popular, and fairly dense much like most male romance protagonists. Sometimes they have distinctive personalities. Sometimes they very much don’t. In Nino’s case she’s definitely got that dense thing going for her, but she’s more eccentric than usual for a shoujo protagonist. I’m pro weird-girl so that’s a plus for me, though I won’t act like I love everything about her.

Nino’s a bit of an obsessive, with her hyperfixations of choice being music and that Momo guy. And that Momo guy is intrinsically tied to her music obsession, though there’s some Yuzu mixed in that part as well. And her own love for music independently of that, I assume, but that’s not something we see much emphasis on. She’s fixated on the idea of her voice reaching Momo, based off of something he said in their younger years. She held on to that idea for six years seemingly without losing any intensity whatsoever. I can get a bit obsessive when falling for someone, and have lingering feelings for crushes from long past, but this Nino gal takes it to a whole ‘nother level. It’s like she hardly cares about anything else. This isn’t something I inherently consider a huge demerit. I can say something similar about Kazusa Touma from White Album 2, and I love her quite a bit. I think the biggest problem here is they don’t do a great job convincing the audience we should be as obsessed with Momo as she is. At least with Kazusa you see her dynamic with the MC in real time and get a good sense of how they got so entangled. With Nino it’s like… okay, we got some flashbacks of how she held hands with Momo and sang with him a lot and had a cute little kid crush or whatever. But it’s nothing so exciting that it sells the ship into the modern day when their present dynamic is a lot more limited and rocky. Makes it harder to connect with her.

On the flip side, even if it’s hard to connect with her singular obsession with this particular dude, there are still some aspects of it I find admirable. Even if I find it hard to fully connect with her motivations, I appreciate the way she puts her all into her goals. A big part of this story is how her feelings interplay with her art, and that comes across very well in spite of it all. Of course Saori Hayami plays a major role in that, but I can’t discount her writing entirely. One scene I was particularly struck by was her emotional exchange with her frenemy Miou. In this part Miou directly called her out for singing for a guy six years straight. At least the author’s got enough self awareness to actually address this right? To Nino/the author’s credit, she’s actually got a pretty damn good answer for it.

Y’know, one of the criticisms I’ve seen for this show is that they don’t like the drama. I have mixed feelings about the drama in this show personally. However, this scene right here, this is good drama in my books. Of course you got to give props for the voice actresses for selling it. Miou’s voice actress Ayahi Takagaki put in some good work here, but do I even need to say who stole the show? Y’all get it. Hayamin’s incredible.

Back to the monologue, the part I admire about Nino’s obsessiveness is her willingness to stand on business when all the social pressure and everything else is saying otherwise. While I question how healthy it is to get so deeply emotionally entrenched with a person who you barely interact with anymore, I think there’s something we could learn from in her speech here. Perhaps just manifesting these qualities in a direction that best fits you. Say what you will about her Momo thing. That “fuck you I know people think I’m weird but I’m doing it any way” energy is something we can all take to heart. ‘You should quit only after you’ve gone as far as you can’ is a bar. It’s got a bit of nuance to it beyond just saying ‘never give up.’ After all, not giving up on someone after they reject you repeatedly can turn into stalker behavior. Of course the problem with this advice is that determining that you’ve gone as far as you can is difficult to do in any objective way most of the time. Something to chew on any way.

So yeah that’s Nino, she can be a bit frustrating at times, she’s not a new fav or anything, but I dig her overall. I like how raw she can be. Her voice sure managed to reach me.

Kanade Yuzuriha, A.K.A. Yuzu

Oh boy, time to talk about Yuzu. From what I gather he’s the most popular character in the show, and I can see why. I think he’s my favorite from this show too, though not by a huge margin. The Saori Hayami realization complicates things, and as I’ll discuss later I like some things about Momo too. What I will say is we spend quite a bit of time with this dude, a lot more than we do Momo, and that’s obviously going to have an influence on how people view the triangle. I get why it’s like this within the context of the story, but surely the mangaka should’ve expected a lot of her readers would gravitate more to Yuzu setting things up this way. I do not know what she was thinking when she made this series, I just see the result from the anime and have spoiled myself on the gist of how the manga ends. But man I don’t fully get what she was going for with Yuzu, and I’m not confident reading the manga will completely fix that. Still, he’s got a charm to him and I find him interesting so let’s get into it.

So first off, Yuzu’s feelings are pretty easy to understand for the most part. To the audience any way, Nino’s pretty fucking clueless. Yuzu on the other hand is the least clueless party involved. He’s well aware of her thing for Momo, but he’s playing the supportive friend and hoping she’ll look his way one day. Which is a bit fucked up if you think about it. They’ve got this really deep bond and at this point it’s predicated on him hiding his love for her. This is a bit of a dishonest thing to do, but it’s true he’d have a difficult time having much of any connection to her if he didn’t hide it. After all, we see that scenario play out in real time during the show. Assuming you’ve seen the show you probably know exactly what I’m talking about already. If not uhhh… well, you should know the risks by this point.

Yeah, that time homeboy kissed Nino out of the blue while she was freaking out about something. It’s fun because at one level I do like a good kiss scene, though there’s the whole ‘this isn’t actually consensual’ thing putting a damper on it. Welp, we can recognize the problematic aspects of it while still enjoying the passion of the scene, or something like that. Any ways, this impulsive move by Yuzu pretty much instantly led to some problems. Nino was shocked at first, and then she was like ‘don’t talk to me’, and then she was going to quit the band over it. Basically learning that he liked her makes her feel guilty about how she treated him and she doesn’t think she should be around him anymore. It happens, I’ve lost a friend after my crush came out before too. Not going to get into that too much. Not my proudest moment really. I’ll just say it wasn’t a “I want to date them so I’ll act like their friend” thing. I’ve crashed and burned on that method before and I now realize it’s not something you should do at all. But in this more recent situation it was more like “I thought I could be chill but oh shit I ended up liking them a lot and failed to be normal about it.”

Point is, I have some personal appreciation for how tenuous friendships with romantic feelings involved can be. The way Nino seemed poised to run away from him rang true. And Yuzu’s solution to this problem? Act like he doesn’t actually like her and make up some bullshit excuse for what the kiss actually meant just to keep her around. I mean, I guess if your goal is to preserve the connection at all costs that was the best move he could make. But damn that’s just sad man. It’s really fucking sad. Also no credit to Nino for somehow believing his excuse completely. Perhaps she’s got that autistic thing where she’s prone to taking people at their word and struggling to pick up the subtext. I’ve got some of that myself, so I can’t blame her too much. But I doubt I would’ve fallen for that. Well, whatever, guess the plot wouldn’t work if Yuzu disappeared from it too quickly. She needs her band to reach Momo after all. Which is pretty fucked up in its own right. Homeboy’s her biggest wingman while yearning the whole time.

I must say if you ignore the slightly iffy chairs in the corner this is a damn good shot. You see the two in shadows, not being able to read their expressions. He’s cloaking his feelings in shadows in this scene, and they’re conveying that rather literally. This anime may not be exceptional visually, but there are some moments of really solid directing and artistic execution you can see throughout. You can also see this in most of the other screenshots I’ve shown so far. This show can look pretty fucking good when it wants to. I’m not huge on the parts where they turn into obvious CGI while playing in the concerts, but I get that it’s easier to make dynamic shots that way. But when those dynamic shots come at the cost of it being pretty awkward looking… eh… oh well, not the biggest issue.

I suppose this is a good time to talk about Yuzu’s band, In No Hurry. You thought he was just a guitarist in a high school band, but no, as it turns out he’s actually a composer in a professional capacity. For a high school aged band that gets professional quality promotion and significant public acclaim. It’s not like you never see youngsters in the music industry, it’s not some impossible scenario. Still it’s a bit of a mystery to me how he managed to get this level of backing for his band. The talent’s there, but still. Maybe that’s something more explained in the manga, or maybe it’s just a bit of a contrivance necessary to get things going. Who knows right?

So Yuzu’s band is something he apparently setup specifically with Alice in mind. However, she wasn’t around initially so he got Miou to be his vocals. And yet he was the one who played the role of Alice in the promos. This vaguely femboy looking short guy professionally cross dressing… Hm. There’s something a bit genderqueer about this Yuzu guy, though it doesn’t seem like the series has much interest in leaning into that. I’m all for getting gender queer with it personally, so that’s a plus in my book. Can’t say I saw that particular twist coming either. But he drops his crossdressing on a dime when his real Alice showed up.

Yuzu’s pretty clearly meant to parallel Nino in some ways. You see multiple scenes where they’re basically thinking the exact same thing except with different people in mind. There’s that screenshot I showed earlier with the blue light. There’s the way Alice resonated with the lines of a song he wrote, because the complicated feelings he has towards her are rather similar to the complicated feelings she has towards Momo. Hiding how they truly feel.

One thing that is pretty different is their family life. Nino seems to have a relatively normal family. Don’t see the dad around much, I can’t tell if he’s gone or just busy. But she seems to have a perfectly healthy relationship with her mother and gets encouraged by her. Yuzu on the other hand? Well… his mother’s obsessed with preventing him from engaging in music. Presumably because of some music related trauma surrounding his father’s death that I imagine gets explained in more depth in the manga. Perhaps that extra information will make Yuzu’s mother into a more sympathetic figure. As is she’s an abusive helicopter parent trying to extinguish her son’s biggest passion, and it’s really rough that he has to deal with that. Helps make his deep attachment to Nino more understandable. She’s deeply intertwined with his art, which is in part a respite from his unfortunate home life. Fucked up circumstances can lead to fucked up relationships. I won’t dig into this too deep because it’s pretty clear I don’t have the full story there just off the anime. It was nice to see that his concert performance seemed to move his mother at the end. Wonder if that actually changes their dynamic. Whatever the full story is, as far as the anime goes it’s a solid layer of tragedy and mystery.

So yeah, I like Yuzu. I think he’s got some good dimensionality to him, though sometimes he says shit that’s a lot more tell than show that limits the intrigue. We know he feels jealous about Momo and possessive of Nino because he internally monologues that kind of shit in very clear terms pretty damn often. There’s hardly any subtlety to him at all with those monologues, but he’s so emotionally all over the place it kind of works any way. It’s also easy to understand why he’s got a thing for Nino. It makes sense by and large. Admittedly the part where he sets up a whole ass band with her in mind in her absence is pretty wild. Guess absence doesn’t just drive Nino crazy. Yet they connect again pretty damn readily. We see them together a lot in this show. And while Nino doesn’t give him any indication that her eyes are swaying off Momo, she pretty clearly loves him in some sort of way. I bet he would’ve had an excellent chance of wooing her if Momo was out of the picture. Though would Nino be singing like she is without Momo’s influence? Perhaps not. Guess that means he’s in a bind either way. OK, let’s say she has the same childhood backstory with Momo, but then Momo gets a steady girlfriend and/or dies in a car crash. Yuzu would have a great shot in that scenario. Unfortunately for him, Momo’s still around. More fortunately for him, that dude self-sabotages his love like a motherfucker, giving Yuzu’s long game plenty of time to play out. Such is the dynamic that allows the love triangle to continue without any swift resolution. Love polygon if you count Miou but damn that girl barely tries to talk to him after she quit the band. Miou plays her role just fine but I don’t have that much else to say about her, as for the second dude in the central mess… well…

Momo Sakaki, A.K.A. Momo Kiryuu

Momo, the guy who Nino spends much of her airtime pining for. Occasionally he actually shows up on screen himself, but we only ever get him in bits and pieces. He’s certainly the most enigmatic character in this show, and I can’t say I’m entirely uninterested. Also as someone with wavy hair and glasses I gotta have that solidarity y’know. So while I have said that I don’t think the show sells us on Nino’s love for the dude super well, I don’t think it’s a complete failure.

So let’s see here, Momo used to have a sort of cutesy hold hands and sing together type relationship with Nino. But even back then there was trouble in his home life. His parents argued and at some point he moved away without a word. You could blame him for that but realistically he probably didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Since then he has become a professional composer, getting his bag writing pop songs. He now lives separate from his family, living with an older woman who’s basically his manager I think? In some respects he’s way ahead of most people his age. But things aren’t all sunshine and rainbows in Momo town.

One problem we see bits of is that his mom’s possibly even crazier than Yuzu’s. I’m sure this is something that gets more hashed out in the manga, but we really don’t see what she’s all about too much. But what we do see is Momo’s scared of her, and she seems to threaten Nino in some sort of way. Would she physically harm her? I don’t know, would she? Whatever it is, it’s clearly not anything good. So we don’t know the full scope of it, but clearly the dude’s got some shitty ass family issues bogging him down. Poor guy.

Another thing he feels complicated about is his relationship with music. He’s a commercial guy by this point, but he feels some type of way about it. It’s something many artists struggle with. The difficult relationship of art and capital. You can’t really live without money in modern society, but that money often comes with compromises. It often distorts things for its ends. And Momo’s in the thick of it at an unusually young age, and that’s sure to have its effect. Momo used to make music just with Nino in mind and no other considerations, but now all that heartfelt stuff just became his money maker. It’s part of why he finds it difficult to face her these days. Not to mention she doesn’t just sing with him any more.

The stuff I explain above is, as far as I can tell, the main reasons why he distances himself from her in the present day. He’s got all this emotional baggage and decides it’s better to push her away. Or something like that. This is the best I can determine from what I saw in the show and reading a few comments online. But really, I found him a bit confusing at times. I think there’s this effort to make him mysterious on purpose. The opaqueness certainly gives him some intrigue, but if someone was like, “fuck this guy he’s an asshole to Nino and he don’t make no sense” I wouldn’t blame them too much. He’s a harsh dude with his own demons and he’s mostly dealing with it off screen. Bit difficult to connect with that. I do to some extent, but he only gives you so much to work with. Maybe it’ll all totally make sense if I read the whole manga or whatever. But it sure seems like homie’s making it harder for himself than it has to be. Even if there are some legitimately difficult things in his situation. But I feel like I don’t know the guy enough to make much of a definitive conclusion.

Regardless of his reasoning, it’s plain to see he said some things to Nino that were way more dickish than necessary. By the end of the show it’s pretty clear he doesn’t actually believe those harsh words. It’s more of a defensive mechanism. His way of pushing her away. Or to draw her closer without actually saying he wants to draw her closer in that one scene where he shit talked her band. He wants her to quit In No Hurry so she can be part of his band, but he’s still playing distant so he just talks about the quit In No Hurry part. Playing possessive and distant at the same time, kinda remarkable really. Of course Nino’s not the type to pick up on the possessive part of what he’s saying. So she gets defensive about her band, nobody wants someone to talk shit about something they love. By the way, I do have to give props to Nino for that. She doesn’t let Momo walk over her feelings just because she loves him. Of course Momo probably took that as a sign that she’s looking more in Yuzu’s direction. Oh the layers of complications.

One other thing I’ll mention is that thing he pulled in the last episode. Where he hugged her and said goodbye and held her fucking wig hair like this.

God damn if that’s not one of the most romantic things I’ve seen a guy do in an anime, and then he somehow expects to cut things off forever. Man’s just unknowingly making this crazy girl even crazier for him in realtime. Making her go ham on the stage like never before. It’s a bit hard to see why he drives her so crazy for most of the show, but in that moment it makes more sense. I must say I still like Yuzu more overall, but I don’t think he’s done anything more romantic than this. To be fair, he can’t really afford to at the moment.

So yes, Momo has some charm of his own. He also has his low points. Certainly the most complicated character in a show and I can appreciate complexity. But it’s gotta be done well, and at least as far as I’ve seen it’s just not quite there. Basically I mostly just wanted more of him. I don’t feel like the anime gave us enough. Which I suppose parallels Nino’s experience. Getting drip feeds of him. Just enough to keep her going with Yuzu’s support.

Now I’d like to to talk about this central dynamic between the three of them as a whole for a bit. This remarkably messy ass thing they’ve got going on is interesting. I feel like it could be something great but it’s lacking something to quite get there. Oftentimes shit just happens and there’s not much proper build up. Like we’ve just got a bunch of crazy angsty art kids in love doing their crazy angsty artsy shit, and it’s remarkable at some points and kind of dumb at others. One guy’s a bit too on the nose sometimes, another’s too opaque, and the girl’s near blindly feeling it out. It’s certainly an affecting near miss. As for something that doesn’t miss…

The Music

Y’know, I don’t listen to music quite as much as I used to, but I definitely got my music nerd side to me still. I can get a bit snobby with it at times I’ll be real. I’m not someone who’s going to be easily impressed by an anime soundtrack. I like listening to anime songs sometimes. Some of them are pretty good, I’d even call a few excellent. But most of the time when I listen to an opening or an ending or an insert song it’s just kind of eh. Lots of boilerplate vaguely catchy stuff to go around. So when I say this show is great in the music department I’m not just saying that lightly. I seriously dig it, and I think I’ll be listening to some of these songs long after this blog is published. It’s certainly the show’s biggest strength.

Of course I’ve mentioned before that Hayamin’s a big part of what sells it. This role needed a singer that sounded like it could plausibly captivate audiences as much as we see in the series. I’m not going to say Hayamin’s the most amazing singer ever, but she’s certainly one of the best in the seiyuu industry. I don’t think they could’ve possibly casted Nino better. Who else would be able to handle the talking and singing sides that well simultaneously? What other seiyuus would be able to yelp so much and still have it sound good? Obviously I’m a biased source, but still I’m hard pressed to think of too many strong counterexamples. One of the biggest themes of this work is putting your feelings into your art. How intrinsically connected they are. Nino goes all out for Momo and her friends and Hayamin’s performance conveys that quite well.

Yet if it was just Hayamin’s voice carrying I wouldn’t be as positive about the soundtrack as I am. She’s got a good band behind her. I can see why Nino loves Yuzu’s music. There’s some serious quality there. The chords at the start of Canary still reverberate in my mind. That song’s got a pretty good solo to it too. Godspeed Yuzu. I think I’d consider it my favorite track from this show, but it’s certainly not the only good one. I’d also give the ending song high marks. I enjoy listening to pretty much every song from this show, though I don’t think the rest have as much staying power for me as those two. Even so, no matter which song from this show you’re talking about you can feel energy and passion in it. That’s got to count for something.

Overall

So yeah, this show is a bit too flawed for me to consider it an all time great, but I enjoyed it quite a bit any way. I think it’s a damn shame we probably won’t get another season of it ever, and MAL is wiling’ giving it a 6.95 average. It should at least be in the 7s. When this show hits it hits hard, but that doesn’t always happen. I just wish the character writing was a bit stronger. A bit more subtlety. A bit more good buildup. A bit less emphasis on those childhood flashbacks. Sure they explain the context of their relationship well enough, but they’re not very interesting most of the time. Wouldn’t have to change that much to make it incredible. Alas. But hey, I’m still glad I watched it. This show’s got heart damnit!

8/10

Later folks.

1. Many may know Saori Hayami from her performance as Yor Forger in Spy X Family. Personally, her performance as Yukino Yukinoshita in Oregairu reigns supreme in my heart. Also oh hey this is the first time I learned I can do footnotes on here. Probably won’t be the last 😈 ↩︎