Pretsy

Heyo, I remember you! I feel like I enjoyed your music taste back then and clearly, you've still got it

Since you mentioned Lamp (I love you), here are some associated acts you might enjoy if you don't know them:
Tadashi Shinkawa - On Lamp's Botanical House label. A similar "softness" to Lamp's music, but is distinguished with the use of subtle 80s synths.
Minami Kitasono - I can't remember which, but did the arrangement and guest vocals for one of Lamp's tracks on their Yume album. Imagine him as the much quirkier version of Lamp's funkier compositions.
Uwanosora'67 - Super influenced by 60s pop. The band revealed that Lamp member Nagai praised this track in a recent interview.

hi! i was told it'd be best if i just made a re-introduction after being on and off for so long so. yeah
 
i'm Erin. i used to be active on this forum like four years ago but i really don't wanna remember that because i was beyond salvation back then. i also had a shit music tasted. i liked SuG unironically?? god?? i remember liking lycaon and regretting at some point
 
anyway. nowadays i listen to more japanese music in general. i'm a generic shibuya kei stan, but i tend to listen to most of everything! i'm trying to be more knowledgeable of more indie acts lately, and i'm always hunting for recs because i am awful at using jpopsuki or last.fm. or stalking people's libraries. i'll probably be leeching off a lot of recs here
 
i also have this tumblr music blog where i reblog and ocasionally post things i enjoy? give it a try if you have free time
 
i hope i get along with everyone again 

Highly doubting that - at least if we look at how minimal is Aoi's role in terms of Gazette's songwriting lately:
 
Ruki writes most of their stuff - be it the fact that he lets the band filter one or two "non-Ruki" songs into the album, e.g. some BD exceptions. A real shame though, since Ruki too has a bit of "extravagant" taste unlike his fellow vk sophomores (fun fact: Ruki seems to be quite an avid trip hop/IDM enthusiast btw*, especially if we note the fact that he enjoys Massive Attack, Tricky, The Broken Note...), which on the other hand won't sit well with other members in case the band *WOULD HAVE BEEN* ready to open up a bit more on their current influences (aside from being "Slipknot/Luna Sea hybrid" as 2ch metalheads would call them).
 
Also, speaking of Reita: he might lack technique even now, but I have always adored the way he works his bass tune up (dat treble) and uses it in order to channel some very simplistic, but at the same time very dynamic basslines (e.g. Baretta or SHIVER from newer repertoire).
 
 
 
*source: just go and scroll through his twitter and instagram + see if you can spot a few "song of the day"'s from him
 
 
PS.
 

 
How come everyone forgets this Reita gem?!!!

*sigh*

Dotama's Fragment-produced song is up!
 

 
Cool~

To be fair, the way the charts are like now (like spread-sheet data, not your library) look a hell of a lot better. Plus, there seems to be promise of cool data visualizations, which I am very into. I also really like their alignment of the content in the footer, and the added tabs on an artist page was a smart move on their part instead of having all of the content hidden behind a "read more" link.
 
Also spitefully cackling at them changing their image ratios because no the images with the 30% distortion at the bottom are useless. Fuck those people, tbh, because they don't upload the un-edited versions and it messes up history in sense having only butchered band pictures long after some no-name band is gone.
 
 
However, none of this is enough of a silver lining for what happened to the rest of the site.
 
1.) They didn't make the artist boxes on the home page a fixed size. I get that some artists have super long titles (such as Deshabillz' "酔生夢死～無常の風は時を選ばず…朽ちるならそのまま従う事はない…合縁奇縁はセンスの相違。～"), but that's why god invented an ellipses (...). Now it makes the grid that flows on the home page disjointed when clearly they were trying to go for structured.
 
2.) They didn't really improve features people vocalized wanting improved. A lot of people want the ability to differentiate from different artists without having to resort to full-width characters, and in some cases, half-width unicode characters (in case two bands use the same name in katakana, as shown here). Having minimal database experience, I cannot say what sort of effort it would take to actually do this, but I don't think it's as easy as a lot of people are assuming it is. HOWEVER, people have been asking for it for _years_, so beginning the effort to do this, or plan out at least a draft of some sort of solution, would have been wise.
 
This reminds me of my first Boston apartment. Instead of fixing holes in the wall, or chunks of wood missing from the door, or hell, even the nails sticking out of the doorknob, the landlord just painted over it all with thick paint. Last.fm just did the same thing--instead of fixing a lot of problems, they just painted over them and hoped people would stop pricking their fingers on the nails that were jutting out.
 
3. / 2-b.)They removed features in an iron curtain fashion. Like journals, for example. Gone. I'm not super upset about this, although I did lose my year-end ratings list and my running CD collection list, but both can be remade someday if I really want to put my mind to it. But, I know a lot of people used to add journals of their experiences somewhat frequently and it would have been nice to have legacy access to them. This bullet wasn't meant to be specifically about the journal issue, but it is a fairly glaring example of features they didn't refactor but rather terminated. Sometimes there is definitely a need for it, as features go unused and just clutter up space for users, but there is a different connotation and reception when aforementioned axed interactions were actually user generated content.
 
4.) Why are you pushing a live site to production and still calling it a "beta?" Girl. You're not done, you clearly still have bugs because there are little apology messages everywhere, and you only let subscribers use it for a few months before but didn't really change...much? Having used the beta-beta before the production-beta (????) I'm not really sure what the difference is, because all the disabled features of the prior are still disabled in the latter.
 
5.) They're still not being bought out by Spotify. It's competing with the same market and you sell your data to record labels to give them context on who likes what, so why not just horizontally integrate and have one bigger pool of content that takes into account everyone? I suppose this isn't really Last.fm's fault, but just throwing in my two cents here.
 
6.) They changed the scale of the charts. I'm trying to look to see what they changed to (I think they changed it to total listens instead of total listeners), but I'm getting a 500 error because it blew up. Womp womp. Thinking about it a little more, this is how the charts should have been anyway, since idgaf if 504 people listen to Versailles' "Zombie" when "Ascendead Master" was actually scrobbled 10,000 times this week. I'm crossing my fingers for an option to toggle between both views.
 
7.) This is something I just noticed, but they're trying to go for a 'single-page-app' feel but it isn't a single page app at all. Can't tell if it's just because they designed it to imply it will work like a modern web app but didn't know how to actually make one, or they made everything a new page to get more hits for SEO / more burger $$money$$ from ads. 

I think they just need to admit that the update was a bad move and go back to last update lol. The new update will make them lost a lot of accounts/subscribers. 

Honestly, it kinda looks like some crappy combo between Spotify and Myspace at its end.

"THE GAZETTE's New Song Is Japan's Answer To Bands Like KATATONIA"
 
 

Why do most good bands become so repetitive after a few releases? I used to adore Ling, but I don't need to hear 10 different versions of what's essentially the same song. 

青木裕(aoki yutaka)(downy) solo new album (title not yet finalized) will be released, although details have not yet been announced
 

Babymetal phenomenon is doing wonders...(disasters)

SHITTY LOSER DICKHEAD BULLSHIT GO AWAY
 

First time posting in here, so hello.
 
My name is Daniel, you can call me with my username, nokitron. I am 17-year-old Indonesian liking Japanese music from god knows when.
 
It's unknown, really. I did like shounen anime OST's at first (I mean, who doesn't?). First band I approached were FLOW and Ajikan. But let's cut the crap about my "music spirituality journey", shall we? You can ask me more later.
 
Genres that I find interesting: J-Rock, Post-rock, Math-rock, Shoegaze, Hip Hop (still new at this), Ambience and many more
 
My favorite J-Rock artists:
AKFG
Beat Crusaders
People In The Box
KANA-BOON
THE NOVEMBERS
ART-SCHOOL
Nothing's Carved In Stone
NICO touches the Walls
etc.
 
You probably kinda get the image of my taste, right?

Okay, maybe that's all. Nice to meet you. May we can share knowledge further more.

I've never heard of moumoon before, but I like that song a lot. Male Kyary scares me. Some new stuff:
 
bomi is still really good

 
Not really new Suiyoubi, but new weird video
 

 
You'll Melt More! Not really what I want out of them, but decent song. That POLYSICS produced song spoiled me. Also they have six members now?
 

Ayyyyyyyyy

This is an internet forum. Folks are free to react to other messages.

Just remembered how much I used to love this song when I was *still in touch* with anything vk, WHOAAAAAA-AAAAA-AAAA-AAAAH <3

THAT MOUMOON SONG HURTS ME SO MUCH.
I'm pretty fond of Asako, but not a fan of the song. The PV is really cute though, might be a grower.
 
That 'lol' group is literally a joke.
I am fond of this collab with Namie and Crystal. Excited to hear what they'll do, mainly because Crystal has been on fire since she's returned (yah, because of that one single, don't judge <3).
 
Takeru's brother looks/sounds like he's doing well.
 
Thank you for those posts with so many releases man. =3

That unreleased film from 1994 is great. It's highly recommended by Roger Corman-fanboy Bear. So buy yourself a six-pack of beer, invite some good friends over, make some spicy food and watch the god damn film, boys and girls. It's totally worth it, at least if you're a fan of trash cinema.
 
I recently found out about two Batman flicks which looks amazing. Unofficial of course, but Alyas Batman at Robin (1965) and Alyas Batman en Robin (1991) looks so good. My kind of trash!


 
 
Damn, that looks good!

when you're in a hole stop digging sweetie

No one else who has posted they liked it has gotten negative reactions. You only got them because you decided to imply those who didn't like it were wrong or just didn't *get* what D were doing. So you opened it up for a discussion where you were outnumbered.

"Dated" is barely descriptive when it comes to criticizing something (I ought to blame jrocknyc and similar circles for introducing this term to the world of VK-infested bonanza) but that "lol" PV definitely "missed the train" or got shelved for a decade - totally carbon, "dated" AAA copycat, yup.
 
I have no hopes for Namie pulling herself together, but a collab with Crystal might sound like something worth checking out (seeing as mainstream urban scene @Japan had nothing that interesting happening lately)
 
Toki Asako's latest might be something her dedicated fanboys (um, maybe girls too) might enjoy, eeeeh:
 

 
Moumoon's "latest" PV is rather surprising (positive/negative-ly? Be the judge) when it comes to introducing (possibly) the new direction they are heading towards:
 

Ummm...
 
Also, your daily dose of Kyary/SuG Takeru hybrid:
 

"yaaay, I wear MYSELF xDDD"

lol. literally.