Milayou

4 minutes ago, Himeaimichu said:

Tbh, the only reason I really enjoy Das:Vasser is because I'm a hoe for that Matina sound. But I also get what you mean, and there definitely is better out there.

I was convinced that they would finally click because i'm craving this sort of stuff right now but all I hear just falls uncomfortably flat. Looks like it's Madeth Gray'll time again after all for the hundredth time this month

I think i've officially lost patience with DAS:VASSER, I tried giving their stuff a chance for years but they simply don't do anything for me. A lot of VK is derivative by nature but most bands manage to save face by having a little something special to offset this. I just don't get what that special something is supposed to be for them (and to make things worse the production on their albums sucks).

Also this could probably get me beheaded if I told the wrong people, but it makes me furious that the more elitist fringes of VK fandom will hype up middling crap like this yet deliberately overlook an album like Missa because they wouldn't be caught dead listening to DEG. I don't consider myself a hardcore Diru fan at all but "Kiri to Mayu" and "Aoi Tsuki" alone blow anything DAS:VASSER have written out of the water.

On 8/13/2019 at 12:43 PM, Ro plz said:

Giving the internet the "ability" to air out their unpopular opinions was a mistake.

 

Things probably wouldn't be much different if we all collectively gained the ability to read into people's minds and went insane as a result

On 9/11/2019 at 10:24 AM, psychonnect_rozen said:

Wtf is up with the Kiyoharu hate? Lmao. Kuroyume is a alright tbh. Although I can’t deny the bands influence 

Hmmm.... you aren't wrong but his lips still look kind of funny. Hard pass for me!

If we're gonna do video games, Shin Megami Tensei is well known for using japanese youth subculture as an inspiration and Persona 2 (1999 and 2000) happens to be pretty heavy on the VK. One character is a struggling bandman and another one is a gothy girl who sports a classic kotekote era hairstyle (I think Nao from La'mule is most famous for wearing it but you see it on a lot of other guys as well) :

Bonus video :

5 hours ago, psychonnect_rozen said:

Next thing you know Gackt default dances on your ass

54 minutes ago, astra☆ said:

Would you believe me if I told you there's a well known competitive Smash player called Gackt? He's apparently one of the best players in the world.

Gackt himself has taken a liking to PUBG and plays competitively, so perhaps he'll gravitate to Smash someday and take on his copycat.

He can do much better than take on his copycat: he can take on himself.

3 hours ago, Seelentau said:

Na, it was like this:

 

This is psychotic and I love it

Rose Smell Mode

There are some VK cosplay websites from 2000-2005 that are still up out there and it always made me laugh how the girls that are showcased always seem to take their screen names from real VK musicians so you get cosplay credits that go "Sugizo by Toshiya" "Hide by Sugizo" "Emiru by Emiru" and so on

Had to do a double take when I saw this one at the mall. I never found a 1:1 reference picture for it but it obviously takes very liberal inspiration from "No Pains No Gains" Mana

14 hours ago, astra☆ said:

Adding Raphael - Eternal Wish to the list. I think Raphael often gets forgotten about, but they were incredibly popular when they were around.

They're one of those bands I never really got until I saw them perform on video. I used to think their songwriting was too simplistic to be interesting but getting a feel for their candor on stage really brings the best qualities of their music across. Also I totally get the hype around Kazuki now. How could you possibly hate that kid?

2 hours ago, ghost said:

I'd actually like to see more vkei bands do something with shoegaze, postrock, or melancholy rock. There's been a gaping hole where 9goats black out used to be and I don't think anyone else has done it quite like them.

 

Or something that's a mix between genres like death metal/black metal and traditional Japanese folk music I think would be very interesting. I'm really into the sound aesthetics of Japanese folk horror (not sure what to call the use of instruments like flutes, traditional drums, and shamisen, so I just made up a name) so mixing that with some catchy metal riffs and some death metal screams sounds like a match made in heaven.

I haven't actively listened to any new VK since 9goats disbanded, they really were a very special band.

I looked through your posts real quick and didn't see a single mention of Plastic Tree, if you want shoegaze inspired VK you really ought to do yourself a favor and check out some of their stuff. They always had a history of flirting with shoegaze and taking elements from the british alternative scene but the most recent music I heard from them really cranked those influences up to 11.

1 hour ago, psychonnect_rozen said:

Macabre by Dir En Grey

 

This was my least favourite Diru album for a while now. I honestly don’t know why, but I think it was due to the fact it felt boring compared to the insanity that was Gauze.

 

I eventually re listened to it a while ago and while it’s not Diru’s BEST album (I think Kisou was wayyy better than Macabre), it’s still a great album nonetheless and brought Diru to a more edgier and progressive sound.

 

I would say The Insulated World, but I rank that album above Macabre and my opinion on that album hasn’t changed (this goes for most of their albums tbh) and I liked that album first listen 🤷🏻‍♀️

Macabre kind of feels like it suffers from being indebted to Gauze, like at that point in their career they were still concerned with keeping the wind in their sails and replicating their previous album's success instead of letting loose and allowing themselves as much creative freedom as they wanted. There are some less inspired moments on it where the similarities are really hard to overlook, like I could swear Myaku and Riyuu were written to pack the exact same one-two punch as Schwein no Isu and Yurameki.

At the same time though, what makes Gauze so notable in the first place is how diverse it is and Macabre pulls that part off just as well imo. They're perfect companion albums because Macabre covers all of the ground that Gauze couldn't cover, and i'll always maintain that they're the BEST window into what was happening in VK around that time as a result whether you're a Diru fan or not.

What are some albums you neglected at first and ended up falling in love with much later after giving them another chance? This happens to me with VK more than with any other genre so i'm interested to see how many people share this experience.

The latest one for me is La Féerie's "La Berceuse" which only grew on me after I realized how much it sounds like old Raphael (especially the vocal lines which sound like they were written to be sung by Yuki). The first two tracks in particular feel like a more mature take on what they were doing on Lilac before they started really cleaning up their sound. I guess the key idea here is that I stopped trying to approach it like the generic kotekote album I thought it was (and Raphael never really fell in line with that style of VK to me).

Oh damn I completely forgot Kozi was involved in XA-VAT as well. That's another great example. He was already a legend before he formed Eve of Destiny and he never seemed to entertain the idea of sticking around in VK circles under that banner either. Honestly, artists who are actually serious about dark wave probably avoid any hint of association with visual kei like the plague since there's no way it wouldn't be a huge hit for their credibility. I can't see it being a viable artistic direction again any time soon.

1 hour ago, LIDL said:

XA-VAT genre. And dark wave. So these metal stuffs are not so over saturated anymore.

I get the feeling that japanese dark wave artists that openly associate with VK will always be kind of rare since there's already a well established scene for them to operate in and they both already share the same melodramatic elements and extravagant visuals. It's essentially a niche within a constantly shrinking niche. There was a wave of them in the past but aiming to make it as "a VK artist" was a lot more profitable back then and hoping to reach broader audiences probably seemed like a more realistic prospect for the guys pulling the strings. I imagine there must have been more room to try things out and cross into different genres than there has been in recent times.

Also Shuji had to establish himself as a scene veteran first before he could start messing around and release music as Goatbed and XA-VAT. Basically you've gotta keep your fingers crossed that another VK daddy will come up with a new side-project where he gets to play whatever the hell he wants.

I wish more songs had 10 seconds of church bells/footsteps/creaking door SFX thrown in the middle

On 8/29/2019 at 9:06 AM, inertia said:

I think it was around ’98 that we started to see some improvements in bandwidth and webpages that let us take it to the next level. There was a guy in Singapore (Paul? maybe?) where they had better wiring, who first started putting up a few tiny RA and RV files on a site, and he had one of the early message boards too. By this time I was out of school and my circle of friends and I were working in the early internet, which gave me access to equipment, software, and bandwidth that almost nobody had at that time. My friends were installing the actual wiring and servers to build the NYC internet, and uh… while they were at it, they stashed an old computer somewhere to be our own FTP server. We put up my files (I had a ton of stuff because I’d been running the tape-exchange listing, and also I bought stuff from the Japanese stores in NYC) and allowed other people to upload their own. I added a message board which was originally supposed to be for requests or whatever but it took on a life of its own as a discussion place.

😲😲 Missed that part the first time around, what an insane bit of history. Until someone comes up with evidence of mayor Giuliani doing furi at a band's show that's gonna be really hard to top.

Were members aware of this at the time or was it kept hush-hush until later?

Now as for who influenced who.... you have the rest of the day to place your bets

On 4/2/2019 at 2:16 PM, Peace Heavy mk II said:

For context: KR were formed in the very early 90s and are most well-known in the West as "the band both of Malice Mizer's drummers were in."

I'm almost certain they share more than just drummers: their guitarist (and main songwriter I believe??) played in Mana and Kozi's first band and there's a neoclassical vibe to their first two albums that's awfully reminiscent of Memoire/Voyage era Malice Mizer at times. Connecting the dots between bands is half the charm of old school VK!!

On 8/19/2019 at 3:44 AM, hopefully_benign said:

I'm looking for old, edgy grimdark vk after vk kind of evolved away from 80s speed metal territory, but (here's the important part) before western nu-metal/alternative metal influences started creeping in. Basically, not too soft, but no chugga chugga riffs.

 

for reference, I like Deshabillz, Madeth Gray'll, old(!) Dir en Grey, Aliene Maφriage, La'Mule, Cali Gari when they had their second singer, Genkaku Allergy and some others. I find that sort of mix of over-the-top melodrama and quasi-punk aggression compelling.
There's probably a huge chunk of late 90s stuff that fits the bill. Besides what I named, what's the cream of the crop?

I'm not too familiar with their stuff but Merry Go Round always seemed like a seminal "dark" 90's band.

There's also Orgel who fall right in line with Madeth Gray'll, and Kc+loid which you might like as well. I always feel like the gist of this stuff was released in 2000/2001 rather than the 90's proper by the way so you might have some chance digging just sliiightly further down the line (basically right before the genre went full nu metal/UCP style)

Yes! That's it!

17 minutes ago, Arkady said:

The fact that around 2007/8 some bands did get EU editions you could actually find in music stores blew all our 1st-wave minds. It was a surreal experience to go in a store and find them among other western music and at the same price (true story).

Does anybody remember this band that was put together in Japan to be marketed in the west? They folded immediately after failing to garner interest and instead of listening to the fans telling them "this is not actually what we meant when we said you should bring VK overseas" the promoters blamed piracy culture for the death of their little experiment.

The whole period was a hilarious trainwreck on many fronts but that tiny bit of visibility still felt like such a ray of sunshine, little things like the PV for Saku getting voted all the way up to #1 on some european MTV chart really testify to how large and optimistic the fanbase was around then.

35 minutes ago, Arkady said:

Back in my days (around 2001/2) if you wanted to follow the scene you either googled (band name) + mp3 and ended in some shady page with some songs if you were lucky, or you hoped someone was sharing some of them on some peer to peer program like WinMX, every song taking at least 30 minutes to download beacuse you had 56k internet and were paying every minute of it (my random Lareine 6-7 songs selfmade CD lasted me all 3 last years of high school).

 

There was also the option to buy the CDs, but the chapest ones would cost 40-50€, if you didn't live in Paris (there was a fabled used Japanese bookstore that was all Europe weebs envy) or didn't have parents/friends working in Japan.

 

 

Wow, now that's a feel. I played out my home made copy of Aliene Ma'riage's Les Soirée in high school and it was a shock to hear some of these songs again at a quality above 96 kbps when I revisited the album almost 10 years later.

By the way, you mention you're french, are you familiar with Tanja? She used to have her own website with live reports going as far back as 1998. That place was a goldmine for me back in the day and it still remains an exclusive source of info outside of Japan for some of the more obscure bands she covered.

EDIT: found it again, here's a link for anyone interested https://web.archive.org/web/20120427161556/http://lasteve.free.fr/blog/autres/listeconcerts01.htm