diryangrey

it would be pretty hilarious if grieva formed under goemon with a new name lmao.

I miss the 1999~2004 style of vkei promo pics: super blown out faces that are slightly tinted green or orange with early pokemon card-esque backdrops

metal wa hajimemashita, just for the nostalgia of watching that beautiful mess of a PV with friends
though Gei School Otokogumi deserves a special shoutout just for that godawful bit where Chiba pops into frame & does the horse sound

ofc okuru kotoba's the only album where what they do sounds vaguely like music so kinda hard not to call that one my fav

they sold out their one man a month in advance? 
 
inb4 half the livehouse is just full of cardboard cutouts of random bangya & other vk musicians

uncomfirmed tracklist:
 

The new X-Japan album was inside you all along. 

i do what i want, dad!

I'm expecting Chaos'/glamscure's statement on this either tomorrow, or sometime this week, since this literally just happened. This is truly unexpected and my heart breaks for him. He was really starting to become one of my faves.
 
 

Heresy! Encores are an integral part of setlist planning. I say this as someone who have spent way too much time writing setlists for bands I like. They can provide a necessary break to not cause an abrupt break in the flow between styles (see Dir en grey doing their Marrow of a bone tour busting out MISSA material during the encore), as a way to build tension and expectation and to just allow the band a chance to breathe so they can have energy to squeeze out a few more tracks instead of perform a measly 15 songs.

can't help but feel that this whole debate is much ado about nothing 
 
if you're living in japan and regularly go to lives then you're entitled to give your opinion on their lives. if you're an international fan who voraciously gobbles up all their releases (legally or not) then you're entitled to evaluate the quality of their recorded music. the problem only arises when this discussion bleeds into the neighboring terrain of 'how does one objectively judge a band's quality?' or 'what's the proper way of enjoying a band?'--which never fails to generate 5 pages of same old thing that impresses no one in particular...
 
then there's the question of how much instrumental value you are actually of to the band, which is related but entirely separable from the first. it's def true that the actual impact of someone ordering a 3000 yen album from CDJapan on the band is probably a lot less than they think, but that doesn't reduce the weight of their opinion on the band's recorded music. critics all over the world are paid to do exactly that: to give their opinions while remaining pretty much monetarily irrelevant.

all the #drama going around w/ this tag made me think, there's a lot of people who'd be cool w/ at least the idea of visual kei from outside Japan, but those five scandanavian bands aren't really it & the other bands don't get much attention.

So, i'm not the most knowledgeable about this or anything but i thought i'd throw together a quick list of some bands i've heard of, and write them a quick tagline. they're super #basic, but i had like...... 100 letters to work with.

hope this doesn't seem like self-promo, but here's that list, in twitter convo form, if any of y'all are interested in checking it out.
Spoiler alert, i think some of the bands from Indonesia are my favs.
 

i saw that one 7+hr live Royz did where they played every one of their songs, so i've basically accepted my life peaked at that point
only other thing i can kinda brag about; my first live i ever saw was Naitomea when they left Japan for the second time in their career to play a con that was 4hrs from my house - i'll never in my life be that lucky again .-.

i saw that one 7+hr live Royz did where they played every one of their songs, so i've basically accepted my life peaked at that point
only other thing i can kinda brag about; my first live i ever saw was Naitomea when they left Japan for the second time in their career to play a con that was 4hrs from my house - i'll never in my life be that lucky again .-.

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. 
 
 

kazuki from screw spat in my eye
 
it got really red and irritated for a couple of days

i saw that one 7+hr live Royz did where they played every one of their songs, so i've basically accepted my life peaked at that point
only other thing i can kinda brag about; my first live i ever saw was Naitomea when they left Japan for the second time in their career to play a con that was 4hrs from my house - i'll never in my life be that lucky again .-.

i say this as someone who likes meji a lot - best outcome imo would be all four members starting/joining new projects that sound nothing like eachother, & keeping the band Mejibray alive for the occasional single/EP or reunion sorta tour.
kinda feel like 420 was the summation of Meji's sound, Nepenthes/Eiki/Venoms were some nice epilogues, & everything since is just bonus tracks.
Seems like each individual member has a lot more of an 'artistic vison' or w/e than really fits under the mejibray brand.

i say this as someone who likes meji a lot - best outcome imo would be all four members starting/joining new projects that sound nothing like eachother, & keeping the band Mejibray alive for the occasional single/EP or reunion sorta tour.
kinda feel like 420 was the summation of Meji's sound, Nepenthes/Eiki/Venoms were some nice epilogues, & everything since is just bonus tracks.
Seems like each individual member has a lot more of an 'artistic vison' or w/e than really fits under the mejibray brand.

sadie and deathgaze are on hiatus as well,so...i'm kinda preparing myself to see koichi or tsuzuku with a new project

being a fan of vk for a while, you get used to disbandments being a possibility for everyone but i guess it never occurred to me Boris is a band of people, too
after 25 years they're like, a staple of music, an institution
glad they decided to stay around hearing they just considered disbandment was enough to have me shook

It's crazy to think they were thinking about disbanding though..... I guess they want to try something new, other bands or solo projects? I'm glad they didn't, but this also means it could happen soon-ish
...or maybe not. idk, it's just weird to think about it.

this is really just a drag @ myself but back in middleschool when i was first getting into vk, i accidentally followed a roleplay-blog of Nightmare's Hitsugi, somehow thinking it was the real thing.
I guess i was just totally ready to accept hitsu spoke fluent english and also had the exact personality of a teenage girl?

Also there was a good chunk of time when i was convinced that line in L'Arc~en~Ciel's Taste of Love was "You treat me like a DUCK"

this is really just a drag @ myself but back in middleschool when i was first getting into vk, i accidentally followed a roleplay-blog of Nightmare's Hitsugi, somehow thinking it was the real thing.
I guess i was just totally ready to accept hitsu spoke fluent english and also had the exact personality of a teenage girl?

Also there was a good chunk of time when i was convinced that line in L'Arc~en~Ciel's Taste of Love was "You treat me like a DUCK"

He is playing a character. It's so clear it is funny you are talking about it with such intensity.
 
 
Nightmare has been around with this lineup for ages. Ruka has been the most prolific songwriter in the band. He went on and did sendai kamotsu with them and wrote songs for it. He joins Yomi and Hitsugi on their dumb nico nico crap sometimes.
 
If he disliked the band so much and was annoyed by silliness that would not had been like that.
 
He is putting on a show to seem more interesting because he's probably a fairly boring anime/visual novel/idol otaku. 

would'be down for a disreign EP composed entirely out of ikea product titles arranged poetically