We're in the Band.....Beck 5

Let me just get this out of the way right now; Stop making ridiculous pin-ups of Maho!! (the one at the beginning of chapter 13 is especially awful) Also stop drawing Momoko-sensei in way too much detail. Look she's a teacher, I don't care if she's the hot teacher, and I don't care if she's nipping out, I don't want to see it. Lastly, granted I can't draw anything, but please please please Mr. Sakuishi work on your mouths. Again, largely because of the mouth we have ridiculous to awful facial expressions. Ok glad we got that out of the way.

Beck Volume 5. Thank you lord the band is together and playing a show! It's time for Koyuki's debut. It's just that well...it doesn't go so well. The crowd isn't into it, and you can see Ray and Taira giving each other looks like, “Why did we ask this kid to play with us again?” Koyuki himself exclaims that he sucks while listening to a recording of the show. Fear not though salvation is around the corner! Koyuki gets a chance to sing a new song Ray is working on called “Sister” (this song is called “Face” on the Anime soundtrack). Koyuki's voice blows everyone away, and Taira has is good mojo feeling back so Koyuki and Saku are in the band for good. It's nice that finally after four and a third volumes that we finally have our band together. Don't take this to mean that the first four volumes are by any means a waste or filler. They are fairly vital for character development, and to set up the relationships amongst the different characters, it's just that you want Koyuki to get into the bad the whole time, and it's a relief that he finally is. From this point on the plot runs at an almost whirlwind pace. In the remaining 140 pages or so I don't think more than a dozen pages is given to any particular scene or plot point. This has both a good and a bad affect. The good being that, to an extent, we get to feel a little of Koyuki's sense that he is in a surreal and chaotic present, because his world is changing so rapidly. The flipside to this is there are some really quality scenes that I was dying to see more of, and I think to an extent lose a little of their emotional impact, because we get rushed through them.

Speaking of the plot this volume, especially towards the end suffers a lot from the painfully convenient plot devices that we encountered in the 2nd Volume. One glaring example of this is Koyuki feeling uneasy about one of Maho's rich English speaking school friends. He is a rich pretty boy and Koyuki wonders if he means anything to Maho at all. Conveniently three pages later Izumi-chan returns after a long absence of doing anything significant. On top of this she has just happened to recently broken up with her high school boyfriend. Blah! There are a couple more of these occurrences, but this is the most glaring example, and the one, that while it “fuels the plot”, annoys me the most. Also disappointing is Koyuki acting like a stupid stupid boy at the end of the volume.

All in all Beck 5 is a solid effort for advancing the plot and does do a good job of getting you involved emotionally (varying from pissed off annoyance to yay for Koyuki). The end too does a good job of setting up the next volume. It is still worth your time to read, and to continue to read the series, but it does suffer from some pacing issues, as well as some all too convenient plot devices.