Discussion topic for Track 10 of Love Song: Kooridokei (Ice Clock). Please support the official release by purchasing the album from iTunes! You can find a translation of the lyrics on ShiraneHito’s blog.
Please tag references to later songs or outside works with the [spoiler] tag, providing adequate context in parenthesis.
0 voters
Love this song! Even from the composition alone, it feels very cathartic, like a weight has been lifted. It feels like the sun coming out after a long, long storm. Time has stood still for so long since the girl passed away, but the song’s lyrics describe the man perceiving the flow of time once more. It’s like waking up after spending all night crying, and finally being able to smile again. It feels good.
It certainly feels that way-
But, naturally, I find this song to be a bit more… Chilling, from a psychological perspective.
Thinking on… The dream and the reality, acceptance and perception.
Think about the protagonist’s heart. You may think one way, but still feel another.
ALSO YEAH THIS IS SOME GOOD MUSIC.
Let’s save talk about BPM for the podcast @therationalpi
Not sure if it’s what you mean, but I had a thought on the music. The lyrics go like “ituka miteta, itsuka ha miteta,” where it adds a single syllable in the second repetition. Is this reflected in the music?
This writing and composition of this song is,
coo-coo.
Hmm nobody talking about the story yet, eh? Guess I finally caught up 
So let’s start with the music. I think Bokura no Koi has a competitor now for best song in the album, in my book! The arrangement is just so wonderful, the way it blends with the lyrics. The melody repeats itself, like the ticking of a clock. Yet every time the singer “winds” the clock, something changes; the song suddenly flourishes and comes to life, as it ever so gradually slows down… until the next winding.
I haven’t been analyzing these songs too much in-depth, so I’ll keep this one simple as always. I feel like this is a story of a man (based on the picture, at least) who has continued to fight for what he believes in: even if these decisions he makes causes struggle and grief. It definitely feels like it is set in the future, after many of his mistakes were made. Naturally, he regrets all these mistakes, but he continues to wind this clock, hoping for a better tomorrow.
It’s definitely both a very foreboding and retrospective song. It’s hard to know whether the singer is reflecting on mistakes made or is expecting everything to fuck up in the future. But what is for sure is that he continues to struggle. Some may call it stupid, but so is trying to wind a frozen clock, in hopes for a sunny day to melt the ice away.
M’ Kooridokei~, this song’s so fucking good!! 
WAAAAAAaaaaa!
I’ve been looping this shit all week.
Right off the bat, we wake up from the warm dream of Shinwa, and our MC has had enough of his own weakness. We have a bunch of stuff about time moving, so you’d think progress, right? He seems to think so as well, but 3/4s into the song he notices that he has gone too far. Now standing in the cold rain, he laughs at himself for being an idiot. All this time he has just been moving and not actually going anywhere. He really is ridiculous and laughable. If we bring in the stages of grief, he’s basically been feigning acceptance for a long time, but now it’s time to go back and do it right.
As soon as I noticed in little letters under the Youtube upload that Shirane wrote “I present you the most confusing song ever to translate”, I swallowed hard…
This song is… Interesting. When I read the notes above the upload, I initially thought it wouldn’t connect all that well to the earlier entries, since it had been released prior to Love Song. However, it’s clear to me that this song contains a number of the same recurring patterns as previous songs. The emphasis on dreams, a sentimental singer stuck revisiting his/her past, winter/cold used to represent an unfortunate or tragic situation (like it did in Track 3), it connects very well. I’m not 100% sure on this directly following up on track 9, though…
The singer uses “we” a lot in this song and, since the tense is a bit hard to follow, it seems like he’s referring to his loved one in the present tense. “Someday, we’ll realize, we will realize someday / how ridiculous I am.” This is just following a line where he talks about “we” winding the screw of tomorrow. Is this a reference to his loved one living in on his heart, in a metaphorical sense? Perhaps most of this song is spent revisiting memories, while part of him is trying to move on as others have said? That would explain the fluctuating tense, in a way. It reflects how the singer rises and falls with the emotion in her voice, in a manner similar to track 1, albeit with a more complex, diverse instrumental. Part of me actually wants to say that the singer is perhaps in a meditative state. We do start off in the morning, where he’s contemplating whether to wake up. Perhaps these are the thoughts circling through his mind as he goes through the day. “winding the screw of tomorrow”, I’d imagine, is simply a poetic way of saying he’s trying to find hope and fulfillment in the day to come. I also like the somber reference to dreams with these lines, “we saw / the accumulating dream / Just if, if it only creates / nothing but sad memories”. I see this as a reference to the fact that every time he and the girl have come together in prior songs, they’ve been driven apart by something. In track 6, for example, their dreams diverged even though they started working together. In track 1, they were also driven apart, albeit by unclear circumstances. In track 3, they were driven apart by elements beyond their control (possibly sickness, as Biz theorized on the podcast). His indecisiveness about resolving to move forward with optimism is shown directly afterwards, as he “can’t do anything but to / create memories to embellish them”. In his mind, the only thing his actions can do is try to distract or make light of what happened. The cold hard facts are things, he feels, he can’t change. However, her kind and forgiving spirit motivates him to await the “sunny dream”. Perhaps this him wishing for an afterlife where they can be together, tracing back to his decision to pray in track 7? I also love the reference to the clock, “today my clock chimed again”, a definite callback to track 1. The fact it “chimed again” is clearly a hopeful message, which perhaps ties back to the fact that even in his failure to move on, there’s still a shred of him that holds on to hope as she would have wanted. I mean, when he wound it for the last time, it’s quite the surprise when it happens again. I wonder what it means that the shadow is revolving? If it’s his (which I find likely), I’d imagine this represents his failure to truly press on to life. He moves, but he moves aimlessly and with little conviction. He just can’t muster up the passion without her in his life. I also imagine “looking down to the stars at the frozen sky” is referring to him looking at the sky’s reflection which appears in a frozen lake. “Sunny dream” and the desire for a warm morning is both literal (it’s winter right now) and figurative (he wishes to find joy and happiness again somehow, but he still hasn’t been able to find it. I’m not sure what the color always matching him means, unfortunately. It kind of sticks out to me.
I like how in the last two lines, when he says “But, we are, however, we are,” he trails off and doesn’t quite complete his thought, unlike the earlier mentions. Perhaps, emotionally burnt out, he has resorted to wishing for a better dream once again.
As for the picture, it seems pretty straightforward to me. I imagine this is the boy, sitting at a bench they used to sit at together, and reminsicing about all of their time together after forcing himself out of bed. I say this takes place in the present because of the conspicuous lack of the girl.
I’ll see if I can come up with some more points of discussion later, but one minor thing I thought was: The first stanza has the singer be asleep, and wake up right? The title is Ice Clock so you could guess that it could be an alarm clock waking them up. Or maybe the alarm has been going for a while and “I’m done with it” they’re finally fed up with it and actually want to get on with life.
There’s an interesting previously published version of this song. As ShiraneHito said:
This song was previously published in C65 此/彼/方 コナタ/カナタ | Konata Kanata, an album by Spice Ghost, a doujin group which is collaboration between Rei Izumi | イズミレイ, Yuu Hagiwara | 萩原ゆう and Jun Maeda under the alias 准. This album is so very rare, you’ll probably won’t find it anywhere unless you’re lucky and find one available in auction. And, in this album you’ll find a song with an identical melody with FlamingJune - きみのairplane | Kimi no airplane.
It’s a slightly different version, and riya sounds slightly different too, since this was released in 2003.
I uploaded the album to Youtube, and here’s a link to the song in the playlist, so you can check out the rest of the album too if you want. Track 1 shares the melody with Kimi no airplane.
Yay! I am less dead this week so lets try these again. You can add me to the list of people who think this song is awesome. Shirane has a note that the melody is the same as Your Airplane - which probably explains why I also really love that song.
When I saw the title of this song the first question I had was “Does this clock relate to the clock in Hajimari no Saka?” - this is something I have to think on more myself at this point, but I want to hear the podcasters address it for sure.
It starts and the singer waited for the warm morning he would wake up in next. He is weaker than other people - he has had enough and will now wake up - I take this to be before he woke up he had been waiting and waiting for the “warm morning” no matter how many days passed, but now the singer wakes.
Then they wind the screw of tomorrow - they keep moving through time.
One day they will realize he ridiculous he is. He is ridiculous and has no courage, and is suffering from constant heartache and yet she always forgives him - I feel like the implication is that she knew he was being ridiculous the whole time but never held it against him.
Then they are faced forward and we get some interesting imagery-
“いつか晴れるいつかは晴れる \ 雲を見上げた” he “looked up at the clouds that would someday clear” (this isn’t how Shirane translated it, but to me this really feels like it should be considered more as one thought)" - clearing clouds ties specifically with the idea that the hard time he is staring at now will one day be warm and good even though they are not now.
Then today his clock chimed again and he remembered yesterday (yesterday could be figurative for before) - a day that is in shadow in his mind, He spends time on a bus, he goes too far look “looking down to the stars” - these are probably ways he messed up to which the girl just smiles at him and says “any color looks good on you” or laughs at the image of him in the morning rain.
But they are who they are, and someday they will see a sunny dream - someday they will get the Good End though perhaps only in a dream.
I feel like we are supposed to feel like the act of trying to make happy memories will be impossible for them, he keeps trying again and again because he is too weak to to face today. And the way “いつか” is used in the song is like a constant reminder of how ambiguous an idea it is - someday is never today after all. So the sun and happiness is always locked away in vague and distant Someday.
