sakuran

Dunno about you guys, but every time I see people calling VK art I let go a tiny, but sincere chuckle

well as a useless baka gaijin I guess I'd better quit listening to vk and following vk bands and buying vk bands' CDs and merch and just giving a shit about vk at all then, if I can't go to lives ever, even though this is 2017 we're living in and everything gets consumed internationally these days through this magical invention called the Internet

well as a useless baka gaijin I guess I'd better quit listening to vk and following vk bands and buying vk bands' CDs and merch and just giving a shit about vk at all then, if I can't go to lives ever, even though this is 2017 we're living in and everything gets consumed internationally these days through this magical invention called the Internet

well as a useless baka gaijin I guess I'd better quit listening to vk and following vk bands and buying vk bands' CDs and merch and just giving a shit about vk at all then, if I can't go to lives ever, even though this is 2017 we're living in and everything gets consumed internationally these days through this magical invention called the Internet

no, not really
they've been stagnating and losing sales (and fans?) since 2014
http://www.oricon.co.jp/prof/542980/rank/single/
 
sadie was a way bigger/more recognizable name before the hiatus, despite having less possessed demonic weaboonetgya

I think they peaked at 420 for sure. Before the singles run that came after it they were quite an adventurous band all things considered. Emotional Karma is a hodgepodge of different styles from Dir en grey larping to straight SADS to what they eventually ended up sounding like later. They had a few dramatic ballads that clocked in north of 6 minutes, two minutes blurbs of SADS made formless and heavier and in general the stylistic makeup of this band is really the sum of the parts of the members interests. MiA's hard-on for shredding contained in very concise nu vk packages with the least predictable vocalist since like prime kyo of 2002. People who've been calling them generic have been blatantly wrong; they might've been generic for the their own form by end of their run, but not once were they a dime-a-dozen vk band. 
 
 

They used to be my favorite band, but I've been gradually losing interest in them during the last... 2-3 years? The start was good, then they became to sound the same, and also weren't present online as much as they used to, stopped releasing funny making of videos, etc. For a foreign fan it's a huge difference, because it's not just the music that's important when you can't experience anything else about the band. I also think that there are better bands in the vk scene, but I just liked them anyway... until they started losing unity in their image (each member began to look way too different than each other, and it was a mistake, in my opinion), and ran out of new ideas for the music.

Okay, I've been reading a lot of people here saying they were one of the most successful and popular bands out of this latest generation and my question is: were they?
 
I've always felt they are far more successful among the western fanbase than in Japan, which honestly means absolutely nothing to determine their status in the scene. They don't seem to sell that well, the biggest place they held an oneman was Zepp Tokyo (in 2014; other than that they seem to have reached a plateau at Akasaka BLITZ, meaning they've been stagnated for years now) and it doesn't look like they're leaving much of an impact within the scene (if any at all).

I'm saying just because you haven't see a band perform live, it doesn't mean you can't criticize them. Studio albums are indicative of an artist's musical skill and songwriting capabilities. If a band has five albums and I only like one of them, I think it's fair to say that I don't like the band's music. Seeing them live won't change anything. 

Even live DVDs don't fully capture a live performance, especially since those end up being edited and polished just like anything else. 
 
I fully understand the idea of some bands being better live than on record, but it's silly to imply that you can't judge a band until you see them live when they don't perform internationally. 

Sure, but it's not like seeing Mejibray live is just a matter of buying tickets and driving to a local venue for anyone outside Japan. 

I woke up this morning and saw some ameblo notifications in my inbox, and I remembered that the tour final was last night, so I was like, okay, we have a new single and some preview or something.
 
Single (with a $100 limited version because WHY NOT), two albums, and a 108-stop tour? Time to start pawning off my organs I guess.

(For real though, am I the only one concerned that Yukika is going to work these guys to death?)

I got my copy of Virge's Utopia today. Mixed by, mastering engineer, jacket design, photographer, and hair make are all the same people as Mediena's Gothic Cult. But there's no management or producer listed, so that's all I can tell you; I've no idea if they're actually attached to Yukika in some way. I'll keep an eye on future releases and see if anything changes.

why on earth is yukkika pushing them this hard what does he have under his sleeve ...

Utopia *w*
 

imagine some shady-ass weirdo trying to look for a hitman online and accidentally stumbling upon a bunch of of MY DRAGON pvs

All that stuff linked above is not an option if you hate it like I do, lol.
 
Visual kei might as well have originated from two drunk Greeks twiddling around with a lyra after making love to other one's niece. I don't give a fuck. Visual kei is to a large extent my essence and being, but I would rather burn in hell for all eternity than listen to 30 seconds worth of any nu glam/sleaze cockrock, or even all their Kissy forefathers for that matter. I'd rather play 2010's The GazettE covers for a millennia in purgatory than subject myself to any of the bands linked above for a single solitary second. The guys from Bataar and Seremedy may not share my opinion to the same extent, but it's a likely scenario that they'd rather sound like VEXENT/Killaneth/GenericnuVK than OldlyCrew. Most likely these dudes grew up with mid 2000's nu metal kei as well, so whatever the gentleman from X Japan were listening to back in the day has no bearing on their lives. They're white and they want to play Vortex and Remember the urge, and that's kind of it. Wearing a Poison cumrag on your receding hairline is no less hack than rocking a 15$ emo fringe, so if they're dead set on jacking an aesthetic wholesale, then both of these options are just as socio-culturally irrelevant as the other. The concept is not the biggest factor holding them back from being up to the Japanese standard though: it's the execution. 
 
The problem here is that they're really bad and can't even do the little that they do without being embarrassingly bad, so they're forever doomed to play handout gigs at battle of the bands held in youth community centers; begging for Japanese tours from a drug-addled, rapidly aging Kenzi whom Yohio presumably blew to get his start there; or just kneel and pray for the rapid advancement of future technologies that will allow scientist to resurrect the other guy from ADAMS so they can warm up for them at their subsequent tours in the Donetsk and Luhansk republics; remaining forever unsigned, forever stuck in shitty local band limbo.
 
I try to follow these bands to the best of my ability not only out of morbid curiosity, but because if I could find 4-5 able vk fans then I'd start a weeaboo kei band myself. So while I'm sympathetic, I'm also twice as angered by their poor music, their poor taste and seemingly narrow frame of reference in visual kei, based on what I've heard and seen from ~sources~. 
 
I believe not many people have watched the original carting out the corpse of weeaboo kei video, so here's some cliffs (as far as I can remember them):
 
Back in the day there used to be a dozen vk bands in Scandinavia, now there's practically none and the ones that exist are woefully inactive. Finland used to have quite a few, although ranks of the members were very incestuous. If you can believe it, they were actually even worse than the Swedish bands and the two most long-standing ones even tried rebooting before fading into complete irrelevance. The one that I last recall having a proper concert, called "FAEK", has not updated their Facebook since Autumn of 2016. One curious aspect of the scene was also that a lot of the participants didn't really seem to be active visual kei fans, and yet despite that they used JAME to promote themselves and performed largely at cons and warming up for Satsuki/Plunklock tier bands that happened to be touring and performing at a venue called Gloria that receives some strange government money to minimise the L's the organisers take booking these shitty bands. The most longstanding band of the "scene" called "Karmia" appears to have dropped any pretensions towards vk and has settled for being a shitty local rock band. Here are the results: ( fyi the youtube superstar's former troupe that stole their name from Uverworld have also seemingly left vk behind in favor of a more western approach. Unsurprisingly their social media stature plummeted as dropping the Japanese rock shtick just unveils what they really are: one in the rank of millions of shitty local rock bands )
 
 
DIE/MAY is now the only one left and while shitcanning Seike will definitely help, they'll eventually do the routine of downshifting until turning to radio silence and then the eventual disbandment post on facebook, if they'll even bother. Aside from Tuomas and Heikki they also have afaik have one or two guys from the best Finnish vk band in HISTORY that larped TOXIC/DIVISION period The Gazette called "Desier," whom while very bad, managed to sound like an actual visual kei band on a shoestring budget and minimal ability. Conceptually they had a good thing going though. How DIE/MAY performs in their current iteration I will find out this weekend, unless I prefer trying to get cancer outside instead. Any Bataar fans sharing the hashtag can come say hi!
 
edit: This post is already a mess so it won't hurt any that I'll add something that I just thought: conceptual coherency is a problem. When I got to thinking about the last.fm's of these guys that I've seen, or the fates of Overworld and Karmia, I'm not surprised that people seemingly can't make heads or tails of what they exactly sound like. DESIER used to sound like The Gazette because afaik the composer was a huge fan, but then bands like Jenlayn and Karmia straddled a strange territory of sounding like just shitty rock music, in all its terminological ambiguity. It's not entirely farfetched that the amount of band members in the entire history of the scandinavian scene who are as vk savvy as the average member on this board, is as low as 3 or less. I actually briefly trolled a Crestillion live stream two weeks back asking what their favorite Madeth Gray'll tape was and whether they prefer Key Party or Matina. Not replying to me was a perfectly understandable response, but I have no doubt that they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about either. Visual kei in the west is being represented by Yohio ( who's old last.fm you can easily find ), and guys who literally only know Filth in the Beauty and The Final. That's tragic. 

It's never too late to check out other bands. In fact, people still listen to bands that have been disbanded for like, 10 years.

Maybe the vocalist will form a solo project to rival Sui's called Maccabee, prompting a Chateau Agency funded omnibus called Vis-jew-al-kei 

Well, to sound like a broken record - I'm not at all surprised; and they needed this. That's not to say I'm happy, necessarily. Mejibray were a big part of why I got heavily invested in vk again after a few years of mostly apathy, so they'll always be important to me for that. And my interest in their later releases seems to have lasted longer than most people's, since I personally liked Venoms.app and the singles leading up to it, although they started losing me after that.
 
In any case, I hope the guys find projects they can actually enjoy. Mejibray's music was sounding rather bland at this point, and there's no point in staying together if there's no inspiration for it.

Well, to sound like a broken record - I'm not at all surprised; and they needed this. That's not to say I'm happy, necessarily. Mejibray were a big part of why I got heavily invested in vk again after a few years of mostly apathy, so they'll always be important to me for that. And my interest in their later releases seems to have lasted longer than most people's, since I personally liked Venoms.app and the singles leading up to it, although they started losing me after that.
 
In any case, I hope the guys find projects they can actually enjoy. Mejibray's music was sounding rather bland at this point, and there's no point in staying together if there's no inspiration for it.

i hope they never fucking come back! good riddance mejibray have long ran their course, there's nothing they can release that will ever be good again bc they've literally done all possible variations on "mejibray"
 
koichi needs to front an oshare band signed on resistar that will shit all over buglug...spiv states style
mia needs to join a power metal/jupiter core band that will use his talents and actually challenge him instead of letting him continue to plateau
meto can become a fulltime harajuku fashion icon bc hes not that good gorl
tsuzuku needs a sukekiyo or dir en grey tier experimental metal project to DESTROY all remnants of visual kei with his perfection
 
CATCH THE MF TEA ON THAT .
i have actual faith in koichi-core like i KNOW he will summon up ex-DIV, souiumono, kameleo, smileberry, the kiddie, ViViD and destroy the world with KAWAII

Utopia *w*
 

Utopia *w*
 

I bought Medley by Kiyoharu and I Preordered Chimaera by Miztavla