Rock wa Lady no Tashinami deshite

In today's world many "girls band animes" are coming out filled with overdramatic meme cliffhangers, storylines have nothing todo with how the music industry and band really works, while the only thing they don't have is ironically, good music.

This anime is doing everything differently in the right ways, and easily being one of the best so far. Some lines are impressive and hit me hard. You can tell it's written and inspired by professionals who truly struggles and loves Rock'n Roll while understands the technical aspect. The whole show is a self-consistent display of being straightforward and honest, while never tries to flattering the ... audience like some others(you know which one I'm talking about, LOL).

The live performance scenes are one of the best I've seen for recent years being technically amazing(yes they even dare to have a lot of close shots on musician's hand movements and those feel right on spot). IMO only Bocchi the Rock and Girls Band Cry have performance scenes can match, and all 3 of them are miles ahead of other animes so far.

The best part of the performance scenes is, the mocaped gigs are played by Band-Maid, which by itself is already a huge treat for me. The original songs are already great but I have to say I prefer Band-Maid's interpretations most of the time, since you can immediately tell they have put their souls into covering the songs and all of them are filled with emotions matching the storyline. I'm geniunely impressed and satisfied with all shows so far, and can't wait to see the final episode as it will be a huge banger.

Only complaint I have is the manga has even better scenes from time to time and it's a shame anime has misfired a couple of times not able to replicate those memorable moments. The voice acting is generally great but feels a bit inconsistent sometimes, the actors could try to open up themselves a bit more on some certain scenes. But overall It deserves to be put on the top 3 of my list along with Bocchi and GBC. As a guitar/bass player myself also doing a bit of jams with my friends, to me this is a very solid 9/10 band anime and it keeps getting better over time.

I'm about 3 episodes in and I'd say its fun and quirky enough to keep going. Animation is pretty good and has some personality to it which is nice to see. The two mains are interesting in their own ways and I'm interested in seeing how their dynamic evolves throughout the season. Also I can't wait to see the other two band , I wonder how they'll change things up for our two mains and what they bring to the band.
Like I said so far I'm interested but I could see myself dropping the show if things get stale or if the ... music isn't for me. Also side note: someone on the production team has a thing for sweat.... its not subtle at all. The way the two mains would go from being totally fine to extremely sweaty and then back to normal is very off-putting to me. Its not bad enough to consider dropping the show or anything but damn even the ED has sweat all over the place ..literally. Anyways so far I'm liking it, we'll see how it goes.

First time writing a review for anything, because this show finally confirmed a pet peeve that I couldn't put a finger on when watching music and performance related anime. I really don't like when so much melodrama is added- via excessive monologuing, visual effects or writing- to live performances. Especially the trope of the character bombing the start of the performance and going through an intense inner soul-searching, before getting an epiphany of sorts and suddenly blowing everyone's socks off (audience: "her tone changed?!"). This is probably biased cos I'm a guitarist myself and have bombed my fair share of concerts LOL and well this ... just does not happen at all, and just takes away the immersion of the scene and reflects on poor characterization.

speaking of characterization, All the characters in this show is kinda one dimensional- school setting? just portrayed as a generic rich school full of shallow simps with supposed connections to japan's top politicians (kakegurui did this same thing better) that have no relevance at all. Otoha? her entire personality is "perfect" on the outside and swearing while playing drums, with her only motivation being wanting to have fun. How did she get so good and what influenced her playing style? not relevant i guess. Lilisa makes even less sense- her character motivations just seem to do 180s every episode between wanting her mum to be accepted into the family and a maniac that doesn't care about anything other than playing loud? So we're led to believe that embracing her true self is character growth yet she has to continue to try even harder to keep up the facade to appease her mother and achieve the nobel lady award... how much she has to train and practice for both sides of her life to be perfect is frankly unrealistic too. other band also suffer from a one trick gimmick and are not really worth talking about. The conversations between them felt horribly tone deaf and predictable too- yea we get it rock is about yelling and cursing and seeing noble girls do that is funny and interesting haha


back to melodrama in music animes: Your lie in april does have a similar thing where Kosei's performance are full of monologuing and stylistic changes, but I'll let that because its integral to his character development and its more believable (dude's entire childhood was practicing 40 hours a day lol). Rock is a lady's modesty just does not feel grounded at all compared to similar titles like Bocchi the rock where each character was instead fleshed out more and their motivations translated more seamlessly into how they played live.

On the plus side gotta respect the staff that worked on this by using mocaps of actual musicians performing, and that takarajima performance alone was damn near perfect (that clip was what convinced me to watch this anyway).

would have given this a 4 but the music is great so overall 6/10