NICKT

Thirteenteen?

He put out an album last year and he was the vocalist for this season's Kamen Rider opening theme. Apparently just did a song with pop singer ASCA, so he's been doing stuff pretty regularly.

Get out your shovels, boys, 'cause this is a hell of a grave topic I'm digging up. So Darrell just put out a new CD and for those who aren't aware it's the current band of DEATHGAZE's final vocalist and main songwriter, the thing in particular worth mentioning is that their recent single also contained a second disc of a bunch of DEATHGAZE re-recordings. Surprised to not see any discussion about it on MH so I thought I'd poke a little.

I'm not musically articulate enough to actually discuss this stuff outside of surface level observations so I'll just respond to this in particular, this board started as a visual-kei board a long, long time ago but, like me, a lot of older name stays have grown dissatisfied with current visual-kei outputs or needed more and branched out, so you'll get some general Japanese music discussion but still with a major focus on the visual-kei genre in particular.

It's not even so much the West but more so just the US, and it's a pervasive mentality that manifests in every corner of entertainment(and probably everything else as well). Can't help but compare yourself to the big dogs, especially when it's your competition. I mean, Japan is the only place on the planet with a majority speaking Japanese so most of the entertainment they consume is produced by themselves for themselves. However an absolute metric fuck-tonne of US content is produced and then almost forced upon the rest of the world. As an Australian, aside from the cornerstones of Australian dramas(Neighbours and Home&Away) I couldn't tell you a single other Australian drama series, but I sure as damn hell could tell you US ones. Even our stars when they get big fuck off to Hollywood because it's viewed as the end goal. (Margot Robbie, of Wolves of Wall Street and Harley Quinn fame, left Neighbours to go to the US.) You'd think that Japan, by nature of it not speaking English as a major language would be exempt from this mentality but they are still susceptible to it. From the Western acts that tour and sell out the Tokyo Dome repeatedly all the way down to just the immense budgets thrown at CG in movies, you can't compete with Hollywood and it becomes the yardstick we're all measured by. I've shown people Japanese dramas and also read comments online that consistently call it out for either being bad or over the top, the music for being simple and generic, especially when it comes to following Western trends they seem to get it way after the fad's gone and apparently only tap into it's surface level.(Or at least that was the impression I got from being eviscerated online sharing a SiM song to an acquaintance.) When you go and watch the Japanese Godzilla movies and see the man in the rubber suit but then go watch the American ones and it's this gargantuan CGI beast then you can clearly see the different playing fields. Japan's just gotta deal with Japan, and in all honesty it's amazing just for that, but Hollywood and the States has the world's entertainment market by the balls, no doubt. (Anime's probably the one category where Japan dominates everywhere else and I imagine that's why they're pumping it with so much garbage material because the fans will always lap it up. Western animated materials are mainly kids shows and that comes with a lot of condescending design mentalities so it's never worth the comparison. I was also considering video games as another one that Japan dominates but I'm changing my mind on that. There was an interview with the translator for the GBA FFIV where he said that he gave presentation(s) to the studio on Western video game design. FFXIV also has been wanting Western blood in it's development for a while now, especially in it's raid series where they say they're having immense trouble finding raid designers from the West that can also speak Japanese.)

When it comes to trying to discuss these things about Japanese music is that majority of the online western communities that will engage the discussion are into alternative genres and will be incredibly biased. That's how you often get lists of "best voices in Japan" that'll top out with the Gazette or Dir en grey if not completely filled with just VK bands. Even just going through this topic, I mostly skimmed it and saw two posts that discussed artists I wouldn't put into alternative genres and even then, Daoko is kind of her own thing. When it comes to vocals, my mind always goes to one of the singers of EXILE, Atsushi. A couple years back he left and went to America, putting the group on hold solely so he could get experience and grow as a vocalist outside of Japan. EXILE would probably be my go to if I wanted to put forward an artist that I thought could contend for at least having acceptable vocal ability on a global stage, but I'll be honest and say that's only because my first pick you already cut in your opening post.

Dead, left the band or on a cruise?

KitajimaToru[nZk] heh My money's for a Dir en grey alt where they play their old music without chugging it to pieces. Girugamesh coming back as an alter ego band like they did in the Mucc cover album would be nice too.

Let's see, in my library the artists that have Japanese and Hip Hop tags... 2WIN, AK-69, AKLO, BAD HOP, BENI, Chemistry, DA PUMP, DOBERMAN INFINITY, EXILE SHOKICHI, EXILE THE SECOND, Hilcrhyme, Home Made Kazoku, Katou Miliyah, KEN THE 390, KOHH, nobodyknows+, SALU, Shonan no Kaze, SKY-HI, SOUL'd OUT, TOC, Tosaka Hiroomi, T-Pablow, YORK, YZERR. Some of those are gonna lean more into other genres, mainly pop and I think there's one or two trap/rap, maybe some R&B, but nonetheless here goes~ Sorry in advance if some of these fall out of the purview of hip-hop, I'm incredibly genre inarticulate and rely on a lot of public sources for genres so I imagine I get it wrong from time to time. (Also, guys, spoiler the videos for viewer's sake, saves the page from taking heavens to load.)

So this originated in a news post and I didn't want to respond there and then I figured that at one point we spoke about this in a general thread so here we are now. I've never been physical CD listener of VK, the amount of music I listen to would amount to an insanely large assortment of jewel cases and it just was never a logical decision, especially considering shipping prices and it just became a joke. I started out originally having a collection on my computer and then would put my favourite few songs on my phone and then I upgraded to an MP3 player that housed my entire collection, removing everything off the computer. Though, the small size of this MP3 player and the following iPod forced me to instead of keeping entire albums to just quickly go through, find which songs I liked and then delete the rest. I started being a shut-in and listening to music on the go wasn't necessary so I started keeping music on my PC again. I now also use Spotify because copying and pasting every new CD to an MP3 player was just excessive hassle and unnecessary wasting of time. I stuck with Windows Media Player for way too long before shortly moving to iTunes and now I'm stuck firmly in MusicBee. Now, I get the appeal of having CDs and a large physical collection for collection's sake but I can't fathom actually having it that way with function. Maybe I have music playing way too much compared to others or I spend too much time on the computer where my music's stored and easily accessed but having to deal with all the faff in regards to actually playing CDs, going from one artist to another artist or even from one album to another is just easier with a digital library. With physical media you also don't get tags and metadata. For the past few years I've gotten stupid when it comes to my library and have begun tagging to all hell, trying to make things as organized as it can be. This is a screenshot of the first page of tags in MusicBee. If I wanted to listen to rock music then I'd go up to the top and type in rock, voila: automatically get a rock playlist. Release date isn't just by year but now includes month and day in the correct order(Lookin' at you, America) which means when artists are sorted by release then it's actually ordered properly. Composer credits so that if I found a song I liked I can find songs by the same song writer. The grouping section is home to my Visual Kei tag which makes it super easy to isolate just the Visual Kei parts of my collection. Using both the artist and album artist tags I can have artists sorted alphabetically but still have them displayed with their Japanese names. I originally had both genres and composer/arranger credits listing using commas but that ran into issues when names kept reappearing because if you typed "Writer A, Writer B" and then "Writer B, Writer A" those two whole bands are two separate tags. With the semi-colon it actually stores each one separately. So each genre will now properly list here isolated instead of being long chains of repeating genres. This is page two of the Tags, this is Gackt's Ai Senshi, because it covers a lot of the unique tags. Original artist is for covers, it's an original tag for MusicBee and you can see my custom cover tag which I realized was superfluous. The tie-in tags are for when a song is used in a piece of media, it names the media and categorizes it along with it's usage. If you wanted to listen to anime openings then you could just go to the search bar, type in anime opening and voila. The language is self explanatory and it shocks me that it's not used officially. Romaji and translation are just for Japanese songs because I like having an song presented with it's proper title in Japanese characters but for searching it's hard if you don't remember the kanji, etc. I often see people have the song name in english with either the romaji or Japanese title in brackets and it just looks horrible, this way all that information is kept out of the way so you get a clean library but that information is still there if you need it. This is my main page/layout for MusicBee when I'm using it day-to-day. The artist column is ridiculously wide because I hate how names display when they're longer than the column and you have to account for those stupidly long Visual Kei band names. Underneath the album art you can see it displays relevant information like genre, publisher/label and language along with release date and title of the disc. Composer and arranger credits are also visible to help you see which songs were by who. Here's another example with Dir en grey's GAUZE: Another interesting thing can be done here using those tie-in tags and also the cover tags. MusicBee and I assume other programs have it too, but you can make automated playlists. The criteria which it can sort and filter by is amazing, so for covers I can just set it to look at the original artist tag and if it's not empty then it'll throw the song into the playlist. Same with the tie-in tag. MusicBee allows you to have multiple tabs like a browser and in these I have different playlists open and locked, with these tabs you can even change the layout so in my cover tab for instance, I've taken out the composer and arranger credits and instead have the original artist tab displayed and then sorted it by said tab. The anime tab is similar but instead of original artist I have the series name(which it's then sorted by) and usage displayed. This is great because despite songs for a show being from different artists this way it'll group them together and if you look above at the criteria screenshot there's a partially hidden checkbox that if you click filters out duplicate songs so if you have a song on a single and then the same song on an album it'll only keep one in the playlist. (I'm a big fan of Gundam.) So yeah, just the extent of what I can do with my collection digitally will never be even closely met by physical media, outside of novelty I just don't see the value in a physical collection. And yes, most of the reason why I posted all this is because I wanted people to see the effort and time I've wasted. EDIT: Oh, I suppose adding this would be a nice way to cap this off:

I've been starring songs that I like in my music library and I believe most if not all of my visual kei stuff is tagged as such so going through these are the albums that end up with favourable numbers: Alice Nine - VANDALIZE Awoi - Aoi ClearVeil - RE:BORN DEATHGAZE - BLISS OUT D'espairsRay - coll:set Dir en grey - Gauze EAT YOU ALIVE - The world is mine Girugamesh - Girugamesh lynch. - SHADOWS MALICE MIZER - Merveilles Merry - Beautiful Freaks (Weird how it drops off after M, there were a couple that had like, 6 starred songs which I felt wasn't enough for 'top albums', things like Suicide Ali's last album for example, also a lot of bands that I've adored but only produced singles or had one amazing song but I've either not listened to their other stuff yet or the rest of their discography is garbage.) Out of those, I'd probably say... D'espairsRay, Dir en grey, Girugamesh, MALICE MIZER and... lynch., fuck it.

Everyone here bemoaning digital releases makes me wonder how you consume music. I have a couple music cds but I literally have not listened to non-digital music since the mid 2000s. Spotify for when I'm out and about and when I'm at home I've got my thousands and thousands of songs on my computer, can't imagine sitting there and being like "Hey I wanna listen to music" and then staring at a stack of jewel cases whilst I figure out what I want to listen to. So much ease and comfort with my digital library and can't even begin to imagine going back to physical.

Not sure if they plan on keeping this one up, but it's the premiered video with a little clip at the end from LiME talking about their cancelled one-man and COVID stuff.

I'm loving it, don't know why you guys have such a stick up your arses tbh.

It even appeared on one of those band guitar video games, but I don't remember which one. Though I don't think Diru actually had a song in the movie proper, maybe in Japan, whereas X was the end credits song even in the movie rip I have.

I'm not musically articulate but I'll throw my hat in the ring anyway. Going by stars I started losing interest/focus after IN THIS ERA, with the only song I didn't care for before that being ALLERGIE which is interesting 'cause I see a lot of love for it here, so I'm listening to it again but jesus fucking christ it just sounds like a shitty Diru song. My favourites were BARRIER and IDOL, for sure. I liked more songs than I did XIII (8/12 vs. 2/13) and it's the most I've enjoyed an album by them since GALLOWS (10/13). Feels like they've cut themselves a new corner that's just not the lynch. I got into when I was a wee little teen breaking into the Visual Kei vault years and years and years ago, but this is the best they've been at it yet imo.

I'd pay cold money to hear Kyo do some stupid growl squeal of "arufooooooooooooo".

Ah, feels like just yesterday when everyone was ripping on DEATHGAZE for having only 1 song they re-used and would big talk lynch. as a better alternative.

ooooooh. So that explains the Bad Hop live, was wondering why there was no audience. They've not archived it, but they did upload a song from the live:

I'm not good with genres and technicalities so forgive me if some of these are outside your field, going through my library for Japanese rock that's not tagged with visual-kei. [Alexandros] The Birthday coldrain Crossfaith Flumpool Frederic Gackt Hyde ikimono gakari m:a.ture MAN WITH A MISSION Miyavi Nishikawa Takanori Noisycell OLDCODEX Polkadot Stingray Sakanaction Sawano Hiroyuki Sever Black Paranoia SiM (Silence iz Mine) SPYAIR Superfly Survive Said The Prophect Kobayashi Taro UVERworld A lot of these I'm sure are going to fall outside the criteria, but I'm hoping at least one or two work. I reckon The Birthday's probably the best bet.

It's a statement, that's for sure. A tedious one.

I'll cross my fingers but I've been mixed for every album since DARK.

So much nostalgia, hurts my then teenage soul, though that might just be angst. Went and checked, was a tiny-bit surprised Gackt's REBORN isn't up there, though I figured that it's mostly just because it's infamously regarded as a single compilation instead, but it was his last album for 7 years by the looks of it, being followed by Last Moon in 2016. Going through my library for more notes... And~Eccentric Agent~(However you write their name out) - & - Born's Abnormal Head Machine Ha, there's Girugamesh's NOW, would love to see more of the fan reaction to that one. Merry's Underworld MUCC's Kyuutai Remarkable though, hm...