YURiKA -- MIND CONDUCTOR

Happy Monday! Well, after an unusual absence of about a month, our food-and-anime routine was back on top yesterday, and just in time, too, since anime's Spring 2017 is about to end. That also sadly means that "Little Witch Academia"（リトルウィッチアカデミア）is finishing its run. In fact, I think the final episode aired yesterday (though I probably won't see it for another couple of weeks).

Going on for two continuous seasons left a lot of time for character and story progression although I think it was more on the latter end. So, in contrast to some of the "I Love Lucy" dealings among the original triumvirate of Akko, Lotte and Sucy in the first 12 episodes, things got more serious in the 2nd half with Akko being pulled in opposite directions by the good-but-flawed Chariot and the bad-but-perhaps-redeemable Croix. It's been fun and I'm hoping that perhaps another season may be coaxed out of Trigger in the near future.

Again, there haven't been any immediate earworms for me among the four anison that have come from "Little Witch Academia", and that includes the first ending theme "Hoshi wo Tadoreba"（星を辿れば）by Yuiko Ohara（大原ゆい子）. But like that one, the second opening theme has begun some slow inroads into my head.

YURiKA's "MIND CONDUCTOR" , which was released as her 2nd single in May 2017, is your typically galloping pop-rock piece meant to get everyone's blood coursing a bit faster at the events to come. The opening credits certainly have the characters getting ready for battle in comparison to those from the first half of the series. Looking at the translation for eNu's lyrics on Lyrical Nonsense, it might be the song to wake folks up on a Monday. The music was provided by R・O・N. In a way, YURiKA sounds like how Akko would have sounded if she had been holding a mike instead of the Shiny Rod. And Akko's seiyuu, Megumi Han（潘めぐみ）, is no slouch in the singing department, either.

The Saitama Prefecture-born YURiKA has loved singing from a very early age according to her J-Wiki bio. In fact, she used to sing her favourite Morning Musume（モーニング娘。）, Aya Matsuura（松浦亜弥）and Ayumi Hamasaki（浜崎あゆみ）songs daily in the middle of a rice paddy as a kid. She got into anison due to particular phrases she liked in those anime themes and as a high school senior, she won some accolades after appearing in the Animax Anison Grand Prix for the first time.

The first opening theme for "Little Witch Academia", "Shiny Ray" was YURiKA's debut single from February 2017, and apparently she even had a very small role in Episode 13 of the show as one of the students at the Luna Nova Academy.