helcchi

I'll try not to stray from topic of this thread too far, but here goes
 
So this photo hilariously sums up the state Nagoya is in entirely, with members of Lycaon, heartless, lynch., meth. and ClearVeil at one table (I once joked that Ai from deathgaze must've been the one taking the picture).

Also helps to explain why members from oshare kei ASS'n'ARROW went to deathgaze and lynch. This article further delves into the history of Nagoya kei and gives an insightful look into the scene.
 
Roughly between Nagoya and Tokyo lies Shizuoka where Tomozo's label(s) are based, and some of the earlier bands to come from this region seem to have harboured the sound and looks reminiscent of those bands from Nagoya. Tomozo as a producer has a really diverse range of sounds - once citing Alexi Laiho as one of his influences, he has been in projects with Hizaki and Leda. He also has a knack for signing girl bands but in recent years, seems to have been at the forefront of the metalcore movement in vk - CodeRebirth and Yoshiatsu from Dadaroma, who used to be in Since1889 were signed to Dual Core Sound and Sequence Records respectively.
 
Kansai is so richly steeped in visual kei history I don't even know where to begin. Dir en grey and Aliene Ma'riage's career's both started here. Whilst Under Code was the most well-known vk label in this region, CROW music perhaps helped push that harsher, heavier sound. But you also had labels like planet child music that perpetuated Royz's brand of oshare.
 
MoNoLith were the polar opposites of MiD DERACINE style-wise, yet they were best friends who all hailed from the Sendai area. The MVP48 omnibus from a few years back is a good example of what the bands up north in the touhoku region sounded like. I'm no longer familiar with the current bands in this circuit, but Morrigan seems to have made its way to relative recognition.
 

I have to post alice nine's former PSC-labelmates - bis - for this unlikely number:
 
and what's gossip without their predecessors Visage?
 
aaand a barrage of more bands
 
 
KANSAI
 
 
NAGOYA
 
 
I shudder to think how low would this scene have to sink in order to instigate a retrospection on vk-core...

@DisposableIt's important to note that the music scene in Nagoya, which birthed Nagoya kei, has traditionally looked to the West for influences and developed independently of Tokyo. Perhaps that's why a lot of 00s Nagoya bands such as EYA were still lingering in that consciousness, even though EYA was an extreme exception as Ryouhei actually spent time living in America.
 
Nu metal seems to have particularly manifested itself in the Kansai and Nagoya VK scenes (and by extension Shizuoka due to the influence of Sequence Records and Tomozo's fondness of the genre maybe) - almost every band south of Tokyo carried this sound to some extent.
 
 
Other bands from the mid 00s include 
 
Reivier's contemporaries VanessA and As if in the darkness
 
 
 
@Kaleidoscopedezert clones DAMY (Miharu was a dezert roadie which may have influenced their sound)
 
 
 
 

There was also that fad of oshare kei bands having visual kei alter egos (other than panic channel). Ironically some of them made [arguably] better music than their regular stuff.
 
Ayabie → DEATHBIE
 
DaizyStripper → Frantic Emiry
 
Serial⇔NUMBER → Gothic†Number
 
ZUCK → waruZUCK
 
 

I'll try not to stray from topic of this thread too far, but here goes
 
So this photo hilariously sums up the state Nagoya is in entirely, with members of Lycaon, heartless, lynch., meth. and ClearVeil at one table (I once joked that Ai from deathgaze must've been the one taking the picture).

Also helps to explain why members from oshare kei ASS'n'ARROW went to deathgaze and lynch. This article further delves into the history of Nagoya kei and gives an insightful look into the scene.
 
Roughly between Nagoya and Tokyo lies Shizuoka where Tomozo's label(s) are based, and some of the earlier bands to come from this region seem to have harboured the sound and looks reminiscent of those bands from Nagoya. Tomozo as a producer has a really diverse range of sounds - once citing Alexi Laiho as one of his influences, he has been in projects with Hizaki and Leda. He also has a knack for signing girl bands but in recent years, seems to have been at the forefront of the metalcore movement in vk - CodeRebirth and Yoshiatsu from Dadaroma, who used to be in Since1889 were signed to Dual Core Sound and Sequence Records respectively.
 
Kansai is so richly steeped in visual kei history I don't even know where to begin. Dir en grey and Aliene Ma'riage's career's both started here. Whilst Under Code was the most well-known vk label in this region, CROW music perhaps helped push that harsher, heavier sound. But you also had labels like planet child music that perpetuated Royz's brand of oshare.
 
MoNoLith were the polar opposites of MiD DERACINE style-wise, yet they were best friends who all hailed from the Sendai area. The MVP48 omnibus from a few years back is a good example of what the bands up north in the touhoku region sounded like. I'm no longer familiar with the current bands in this circuit, but Morrigan seems to have made its way to relative recognition.
 

I'll try not to stray from topic of this thread too far, but here goes
 
So this photo hilariously sums up the state Nagoya is in entirely, with members of Lycaon, heartless, lynch., meth. and ClearVeil at one table (I once joked that Ai from deathgaze must've been the one taking the picture).

Also helps to explain why members from oshare kei ASS'n'ARROW went to deathgaze and lynch. This article further delves into the history of Nagoya kei and gives an insightful look into the scene.
 
Roughly between Nagoya and Tokyo lies Shizuoka where Tomozo's label(s) are based, and some of the earlier bands to come from this region seem to have harboured the sound and looks reminiscent of those bands from Nagoya. Tomozo as a producer has a really diverse range of sounds - once citing Alexi Laiho as one of his influences, he has been in projects with Hizaki and Leda. He also has a knack for signing girl bands but in recent years, seems to have been at the forefront of the metalcore movement in vk - CodeRebirth and Yoshiatsu from Dadaroma, who used to be in Since1889 were signed to Dual Core Sound and Sequence Records respectively.
 
Kansai is so richly steeped in visual kei history I don't even know where to begin. Dir en grey and Aliene Ma'riage's career's both started here. Whilst Under Code was the most well-known vk label in this region, CROW music perhaps helped push that harsher, heavier sound. But you also had labels like planet child music that perpetuated Royz's brand of oshare.
 
MoNoLith were the polar opposites of MiD DERACINE style-wise, yet they were best friends who all hailed from the Sendai area. The MVP48 omnibus from a few years back is a good example of what the bands up north in the touhoku region sounded like. I'm no longer familiar with the current bands in this circuit, but Morrigan seems to have made its way to relative recognition.
 

I'll try not to stray from topic of this thread too far, but here goes
 
So this photo hilariously sums up the state Nagoya is in entirely, with members of Lycaon, heartless, lynch., meth. and ClearVeil at one table (I once joked that Ai from deathgaze must've been the one taking the picture).

Also helps to explain why members from oshare kei ASS'n'ARROW went to deathgaze and lynch. This article further delves into the history of Nagoya kei and gives an insightful look into the scene.
 
Roughly between Nagoya and Tokyo lies Shizuoka where Tomozo's label(s) are based, and some of the earlier bands to come from this region seem to have harboured the sound and looks reminiscent of those bands from Nagoya. Tomozo as a producer has a really diverse range of sounds - once citing Alexi Laiho as one of his influences, he has been in projects with Hizaki and Leda. He also has a knack for signing girl bands but in recent years, seems to have been at the forefront of the metalcore movement in vk - CodeRebirth and Yoshiatsu from Dadaroma, who used to be in Since1889 were signed to Dual Core Sound and Sequence Records respectively.
 
Kansai is so richly steeped in visual kei history I don't even know where to begin. Dir en grey and Aliene Ma'riage's career's both started here. Whilst Under Code was the most well-known vk label in this region, CROW music perhaps helped push that harsher, heavier sound. But you also had labels like planet child music that perpetuated Royz's brand of oshare.
 
MoNoLith were the polar opposites of MiD DERACINE style-wise, yet they were best friends who all hailed from the Sendai area. The MVP48 omnibus from a few years back is a good example of what the bands up north in the touhoku region sounded like. I'm no longer familiar with the current bands in this circuit, but Morrigan seems to have made its way to relative recognition.
 

I have to post alice nine's former PSC-labelmates - bis - for this unlikely number:
 
and what's gossip without their predecessors Visage?
 
aaand a barrage of more bands
 
 
KANSAI
 
 
NAGOYA
 
 
I shudder to think how low would this scene have to sink in order to instigate a retrospection on vk-core...

There was also that fad of oshare kei bands having visual kei alter egos (other than panic channel). Ironically some of them made [arguably] better music than their regular stuff.
 
Ayabie → DEATHBIE
 
DaizyStripper → Frantic Emiry
 
Serial⇔NUMBER → Gothic†Number
 
ZUCK → waruZUCK
 
 

I saw some r-shite being linked. Nihil Party is the best vk title ever conceived
 
 
I'd say the future of heavier vk ( as in, in the early 20's ) is as of now is up in the air. Metalcore is far past its peak in America and so far nothing has come along to replace it, but in vk on the other hand we are seeing bands just now coming along that can almost rival their western counterparts. I can't even tell you how happy I was to hear Dadaroma ripping off suicide silence even though it's almost been a decade when that stuff came out! I think that the larger stylistic shift that will happen to vk will most definitely first happen in the west, like with nu metal giving way to metalcore right before the mid 2000's. The problem right now though is that guitar music as a pop culture phenomenon is in its death throes, relatively speaking. I'll eventually feel nostalgic about the 10's visual kei no doubt about it; I love all visual kei almost equally: old, new, green, purple etc. I just make topics where I call certain bands and styles terrible simply for my own amusement.
 
I'm so glad you separate those bands into regions because I feel like that holds the answers to a lot of questions that may arise about the stylistic evolution in vk. Regions and labels hold massive sway in all other genres as well, but unfortunately since I'm terrible with languages I'll never even bother trying to learn Japanese to satisfy my curiosity about visual kei's inner workings. Good thing I got unfounded speculation to always keep myself busy.

I have to post alice nine's former PSC-labelmates - bis - for this unlikely number:
 
and what's gossip without their predecessors Visage?
 
aaand a barrage of more bands
 
 
KANSAI
 
 
NAGOYA
 
 
I shudder to think how low would this scene have to sink in order to instigate a retrospection on vk-core...

this has probably been said/explored elsewhere on this forum, but "oshare" in its germinal stages was really a cauldron of heterogeneous strands of sound and style that probably meant 30 different things to 10 different people. there's a lot in there. arguably its definition only got murkier with time (today it means everything from "colorful clothes" to "bands that do sessions in suits" to "bands that don't scream" lolol, which is frankly ridiculous and totally unhelpful)
 
most of the representative bands have already been listed, so i'll just contribute a few from my own personal trajectory through oshare which inevitably reveals a lot more about my interests than oshare as such haha.
 
176BIZ was the シド that never abandoned vk, and its style survived into its later incarnation ZUCK which stayed 100% true to its spirit till disbandment. not surprising, given that Yuu pretty much wrote everything.
 
SwallowtaiL-スワロウテイル- and phase faith (don't be deceived by their host looks!!) belonged to the strand of late-2000 white-kei-influenced oshare that shared a similar kind of sound with other bands playing contemporaneously like レイラ.
 
 
 
 
 
ジミニークリケット came a little later, but sound wise they could totally have fit into the line of more subdued yet uplifting sound that possibly started with Clavier and subsequently inherited by Toon-Factory and co. This was written by shia and it's really not difficult to see how it foreshadowed some of Chanty's materials today as well (especially their earlier stuff)
 
 
i won't derail the thread too much but it's possible to map larger continuities between oshare of the 2000 and later bands if you look hard enough, even though the tendency is to look back on it wistfully as some kind of a bygone era.  as an example: the toolbox of sounds baroque brought to vk in early 2000 went in so many directions, the most direct one led to rap-oriented bands like bis and a little later: BAELSCOPE, 東京指定, TRA TRA TRA, etc. among the bigger bands, vistlip and SuG describe themselves as ミクスチャー("mixture rock") and regularly cite baroque as an important influence. if you're nostalgic for the idiosyncratic/quirky kote-osa sound (JRD is the expert here), there's SDM, the new (post-ritsu) GLAM GRAMM@R, and there's even a bit of it in early i.Rias. sure, it's not exactly the same, but there's a lot out there, still.
 
 

I have to post alice nine's former PSC-labelmates - bis - for this unlikely number:
 
and what's gossip without their predecessors Visage?
 
aaand a barrage of more bands
 
 
KANSAI
 
 
NAGOYA
 
 
I shudder to think how low would this scene have to sink in order to instigate a retrospection on vk-core...

@KaleidoscopeI meant what kind of sounds would VK be making by the time we're looking back "fondly" at the core era is a scary thought. Post vk-core era could be pretty shit.
Every band that has lasted into the 2010s is now core… and I still listen to them. But now the decade is more than half way through and the more experienced musicians are getting old, there might be some drastic changes to the scene soon.

@KaleidoscopeI meant what kind of sounds would VK be making by the time we're looking back "fondly" at the core era is a scary thought. Post vk-core era could be pretty shit.
Every band that has lasted into the 2010s is now core… and I still listen to them. But now the decade is more than half way through and the more experienced musicians are getting old, there might be some drastic changes to the scene soon.

I have to post alice nine's former PSC-labelmates - bis - for this unlikely number:
 
and what's gossip without their predecessors Visage?
 
aaand a barrage of more bands
 
 
KANSAI
 
 
NAGOYA
 
 
I shudder to think how low would this scene have to sink in order to instigate a retrospection on vk-core...

This is Ryohei Borland on Halloween in 2011
 

 

This is Ryohei Borland on Halloween in 2011
 

 

@DisposableIt's important to note that the music scene in Nagoya, which birthed Nagoya kei, has traditionally looked to the West for influences and developed independently of Tokyo. Perhaps that's why a lot of 00s Nagoya bands such as EYA were still lingering in that consciousness, even though EYA was an extreme exception as Ryouhei actually spent time living in America.
 
Nu metal seems to have particularly manifested itself in the Kansai and Nagoya VK scenes (and by extension Shizuoka due to the influence of Sequence Records and Tomozo's fondness of the genre maybe) - almost every band south of Tokyo carried this sound to some extent.
 
 
Other bands from the mid 00s include 
 
Reivier's contemporaries VanessA and As if in the darkness
 
 
 
@Kaleidoscopedezert clones DAMY (Miharu was a dezert roadie which may have influenced their sound)
 
 
 
 

This is Ryohei Borland on Halloween in 2011
 

 

Even Lycaon were doing it for a little bit. 
 
 
When screw were actually good. 
 
 
 
 
I have to post UnsraW again for this. I had this song and pv on repeat all over the internet back in like 2010. 

@DisposableIt's important to note that the music scene in Nagoya, which birthed Nagoya kei, has traditionally looked to the West for influences and developed independently of Tokyo. Perhaps that's why a lot of 00s Nagoya bands such as EYA were still lingering in that consciousness, even though EYA was an extreme exception as Ryouhei actually spent time living in America.
 
Nu metal seems to have particularly manifested itself in the Kansai and Nagoya VK scenes (and by extension Shizuoka due to the influence of Sequence Records and Tomozo's fondness of the genre maybe) - almost every band south of Tokyo carried this sound to some extent.
 
 
Other bands from the mid 00s include 
 
Reivier's contemporaries VanessA and As if in the darkness
 
 
 
@Kaleidoscopedezert clones DAMY (Miharu was a dezert roadie which may have influenced their sound)
 
 
 
 

@DisposableIt's important to note that the music scene in Nagoya, which birthed Nagoya kei, has traditionally looked to the West for influences and developed independently of Tokyo. Perhaps that's why a lot of 00s Nagoya bands such as EYA were still lingering in that consciousness, even though EYA was an extreme exception as Ryouhei actually spent time living in America.
 
Nu metal seems to have particularly manifested itself in the Kansai and Nagoya VK scenes (and by extension Shizuoka due to the influence of Sequence Records and Tomozo's fondness of the genre maybe) - almost every band south of Tokyo carried this sound to some extent.
 
 
Other bands from the mid 00s include 
 
Reivier's contemporaries VanessA and As if in the darkness
 
 
 
@Kaleidoscopedezert clones DAMY (Miharu was a dezert roadie which may have influenced their sound)
 
 
 
 

@DisposableIt's important to note that the music scene in Nagoya, which birthed Nagoya kei, has traditionally looked to the West for influences and developed independently of Tokyo. Perhaps that's why a lot of 00s Nagoya bands such as EYA were still lingering in that consciousness, even though EYA was an extreme exception as Ryouhei actually spent time living in America.
 
Nu metal seems to have particularly manifested itself in the Kansai and Nagoya VK scenes (and by extension Shizuoka due to the influence of Sequence Records and Tomozo's fondness of the genre maybe) - almost every band south of Tokyo carried this sound to some extent.
 
 
Other bands from the mid 00s include 
 
Reivier's contemporaries VanessA and As if in the darkness
 
 
 
@Kaleidoscopedezert clones DAMY (Miharu was a dezert roadie which may have influenced their sound)