Sol fa (album)

Reception

With the LP, AKG fully realized and honed the upbeat tempo but hard-edged and emotionally charged sound first expressed within Hōkai Amplifier. The urgency of the songs were complemented by the balanced nature of the overall album, creating their most mature release as of late. Gotō credited this outcome as the result of sharing his songwriting duties more evenly with bandmates than ever before. The album was equally praised for its high production quality, which thoroughly nullified the language barrier that frequently impeded non–Japanese speaking audiences.

Upon its debut, the album topped the Oricon charts for two weeks straight and produced four singles, with sales reaching over 600,000 copies by its third week. Its success can be partially traced to two tracks that the band produced, "Rewrite" and "Haruka Kanata," were featured in the opening themes of the highly popular anime series Fullmetal Alchemist and Naruto respectively. In 2016, the 2016 version of Re:Re: was used as the opening for the anime Boku Dake ga Inai Machi. With the LP, AKG also finally succeeded in outreaching to international audiences, a goal they had attempted in earlier English indie releases but were met by little response. The album peaked at number three on the World Chart while "Rewrite" went on to win Best Anime Theme Song at the 2007 American Anime Awards. Following its domestic release, fans from around the world petitioned for Sol-fa to be distributed outside Japan. The support for Ajikan eventually resulted in Tofu Records striking a contract to release Sol-fa in the United States on October 18, 2005.

Track listing

All songs written and composed by Masafumi Gotō except:

Sol-fa 2016

In 2016, Asian Kung-fu Generation re-recorded Sol-fa and released on November 30, 2016. Re:Re: was released as lead single on March 16, 2016.

Personnel