ambivalentideal

I'm so here for this, lol. I really like the otoge-style art they've commissioned, seems like something they spent some money on :'D
Honestly I wouldn't even be mad if they didn't even show their faces lmao although I'm sure they will eventually

It's ok! Nice choices, I can't help but notice aicle in there! I used to be a huge fan of aicle back in their heyday haha. Necronomicon is still such a bop~
Oh okay wow, that's really impressive. I started out in late 2006 but didn't get into it like crazy until summer 2007. I think I peaked in VK interest in about 2009 and it was still my main interest until about 2011, but after that I kind of waxed and waned for a bit. But honestly same, it's something that has stuck with me throughout the years regardless!
Nice!  Check out their album CHEDOARA if you haven't, it's incredible.

Hello! I realized after posting I should've listed some oops. Some of my faves are kizu, xaa xaa, the piass, llll-Ligro- , develop one's faculties, buck tick, aicle, suicide ali, gulu gulu, siren, anti feminism off the top of my head ;;  I can't really think that I went out of it for a period? It's something that's stuck with me through the years.
I've heard of them, though I haven't gotten too deep with them yet. I like rijin a lot! Thanks~

Eh, that's a bit one-sided. My Japanese is not very good, so I might be wrong, but I think Asty's message mentioned that, in addition to harassing fans that he felt weren't participating enough in Kaitou's set, Masato also insulted Asty directly onstage, saying things like "a shitty band like Asty". It also specifies that when they confronted him about it and said "If doing things like that is just part of your act, you should get the other band's consent", he was like "Aren't you an independent band? Since you're not backed by anyone, there's no need to ask for something like permission", which is pretty disrespectful.
 
It might be a bit of an overreaction to say they won't play any taibans together in the future, but I don't think they're wrong to not want to deal with someone that both openly disrespects them and irritates their fans.
 
As far as I can tell, Asty just posted that message from Kinoko because Masato said they didn't tell Kaitou they were going to make this taiban announcement on their Twitter? Asty's Twitter says that they sent a message to a member they had been communicating with (Kinoko) and he apologized for the situation and gave them the ok to post it. The DM screenshot clearly shows this interaction. Idk, I thought they were pretty cordial in the Tweet. They said it's an easy time for such misunderstandings to occur due to missed messages/the limitations of the style of communication.

God I hope I'm posting correctly. I'm terrible at introductions but here we go?
Hello! My name is Ash, I've been into vk since 2003 and I like too many bands lol. I've known about this forum for a while but never really thought about making an account till now, decided to take the plunge to see if I could make friends/talk about bands. Also I'm always looking for new bands to get into so fire away with recommendations! Nice to meet y'all!

Oh boy I have SO much to say about this...I'll try to run down my thoughts while watching the PV:
 
-not digging the intro/build up to the chorus, the songwriting seems decent enough but the production feels so? chunky? it's hard to discern anything idk how to describe it
-their look is really cool, I like it a lot, but I can't help but hate on the "they have a girl captive" trope, it's so tired
-once the chorus hit, I actually really started to like the song. It's a great chorus!
-as always, I love Sui's voice :') I'm biased tho, I used to LOVE Megaromania
-why is she stripping him
-OHHHH RIGHT, I forgot the entire theme of this band is vampires, hence "(Dra)cula." Honestly, I have to give it to them. This is an aesthetic level of vampire-kei I personally haven't seen before lol (idk if this style has been done before or not) but usually vampire-kei is like, Versailles ~roses~ level so this is kind of cool
-this is actually pretty legit, the PV seems professional and the editing seems good
-lmao nevermind, take a look at those bootleg wings(?)
-anyway I would have been obsessed with this in 2009 that's for sure, so it has my stamp of approval. SUI queen slay etc.

Oh boy I have SO much to say about this...I'll try to run down my thoughts while watching the PV:
 
-not digging the intro/build up to the chorus, the songwriting seems decent enough but the production feels so? chunky? it's hard to discern anything idk how to describe it
-their look is really cool, I like it a lot, but I can't help but hate on the "they have a girl captive" trope, it's so tired
-once the chorus hit, I actually really started to like the song. It's a great chorus!
-as always, I love Sui's voice :') I'm biased tho, I used to LOVE Megaromania
-why is she stripping him
-OHHHH RIGHT, I forgot the entire theme of this band is vampires, hence "(Dra)cula." Honestly, I have to give it to them. This is an aesthetic level of vampire-kei I personally haven't seen before lol (idk if this style has been done before or not) but usually vampire-kei is like, Versailles ~roses~ level so this is kind of cool
-this is actually pretty legit, the PV seems professional and the editing seems good
-lmao nevermind, take a look at those bootleg wings(?)
-anyway I would have been obsessed with this in 2009 that's for sure, so it has my stamp of approval. SUI queen slay etc.

I'm so here for this, lol. I really like the otoge-style art they've commissioned, seems like something they spent some money on :'D
Honestly I wouldn't even be mad if they didn't even show their faces lmao although I'm sure they will eventually

I know what you mean, I think many recent bands have been leaning towards one or the other and not as much a combination of the two, which is kinda what I think of when I think VK. So that's cool to hear. I'll definitely check them out a bit further. Thanks for your input  

Oh boy I have SO much to say about this...I'll try to run down my thoughts while watching the PV:
 
-not digging the intro/build up to the chorus, the songwriting seems decent enough but the production feels so? chunky? it's hard to discern anything idk how to describe it
-their look is really cool, I like it a lot, but I can't help but hate on the "they have a girl captive" trope, it's so tired
-once the chorus hit, I actually really started to like the song. It's a great chorus!
-as always, I love Sui's voice :') I'm biased tho, I used to LOVE Megaromania
-why is she stripping him
-OHHHH RIGHT, I forgot the entire theme of this band is vampires, hence "(Dra)cula." Honestly, I have to give it to them. This is an aesthetic level of vampire-kei I personally haven't seen before lol (idk if this style has been done before or not) but usually vampire-kei is like, Versailles ~roses~ level so this is kind of cool
-this is actually pretty legit, the PV seems professional and the editing seems good
-lmao nevermind, take a look at those bootleg wings(?)
-anyway I would have been obsessed with this in 2009 that's for sure, so it has my stamp of approval. SUI queen slay etc.

Does this mean they were selling cheki of puppies and lizards or...?

Well, the gimmick is that they are still trying to become human, right? I think the idea with the illustrations is that the "transformation" is only temporary and once they officially "become human" then they'll probably show more regular pics?
 
Still Team Dinosaur over here, btw. Whether it's boy bands or dating sims, I've always gotta pick the edgy one or the rapper.
 
Disappointed that Jake talks normally in their latest cartoon video though. Was hoping he'd awkwardly keep the incoherent grunting going even in human form.
 
 
In this video, I believe it says that they've gathered enough karma for a quick transformation, but then they turn back because they don't have enough. However, "Kami-sama" tells them that the camera will magically turn any cheki they take into pictures of them in human form, so I guess you can buy cheki of the actual guys from now on?

I'm only here for the guy who has "MEME" tattooed on his neck.

from the left we got your 4 choices: 
1. the one that's prettier than you, has one and a half expressions and would generously let you shine his shoes (terminally allergic to emotions)
2. the gentleman leader with a kind smile, who might either turn out exactly as he seems or he might be a serial killer
3. the short smartass who looks 13 but is most likely into hardcore BDSM
4. the stereotypical bad boy, who gets uncharacteristically flustered and has a heart of gold despite his dark past™
 
I'd play it~ 

Hi. I’m one of the really old fans. I visited Tokyo in 1995 and came back to the US (NYC) with a pile of Luna Sea CDs and VHS tapes. At that time there was nothing about Luna Sea or visual kei on the English-language internet. Actual nothing. Well, the internet barely existed, it was just transitioning to websites from bulletin boards. I made some mix cassettes and handed them out to my friends.
 
Around ’96 or maybe ’97 I checked the internet again, and now we have something: California sisters Freda and Joannie’s website Rockin’ Heaven, and the X Japan ML on cohprog. It was tiny at first, like maybe 100 people. This was the entire Western VK fandom. We had all discovered Japanese music either on a trip to Japan, or through a Japanese friend.  A few of us were so noisy about talking about other bands who were not X that the Jrock ML was formed, so we took our OT over there and it exploded. There was no file sharing or international online stores at that time. I created a page to bring something like tape-sharing classifieds online, a manually updated list of people who had stuff to trade and what they were looking for. We copied cassettes and sent them by postal mail. It’s laughably low-tech compared to nowadays, but suddenly we were all listening to multiple bands instead of just our one gateway band. The Jrock ML membership and traffic was exploding week by week. There was one loud and cynical French guy who was really into super-obscure bands and claimed that he went to Japan and was friends with bands, but nobody knew whether to believe him or not. Word of mouth was definitely a thing — I gave my little sister a few mix tapes when she went to college and she came back for break cursing me out for those tapes, because all her friends had fallen in love with them and now she had to listen to VK all the time.
 
I think it was around ’98 that we started to see some improvements in bandwidth and webpages that let us take it to the next level. There was a guy in Singapore (Paul? maybe?) where they had better wiring, who first started putting up a few tiny RA and RV files on a site, and he had one of the early message boards too. By this time I was out of school and my circle of friends and I were working in the early internet, which gave me access to equipment, software, and bandwidth that almost nobody had at that time. My friends were installing the actual wiring and servers to build the NYC internet, and uh… while they were at it, they stashed an old computer somewhere to be our own FTP server. We put up my files (I had a ton of stuff because I’d been running the tape-exchange listing, and also I bought stuff from the Japanese stores in NYC) and allowed other people to upload their own. I added a message board which was originally supposed to be for requests or whatever but it took on a life of its own as a discussion place.
 
Maybe ’99 or 2000, CD Japan opened. The fandom was growing exponentially and everyone was trying to explore new bands, and even tiny indie bands were getting fan bases. Lots of people were putting up file sharing sites, using multiple GeoCities accounts to create these huge octopus sites. We started to have meetups IRL. Go (JrockNYC) and his friends had a cover band and put together some meetups around NYC. Cameron was in Tokyo and writing on Glam Japan, and some of us were traveling to Japan too. A few people went to that huge concert that Luna Sea did, Dir en gray had fans going, me and a bunch went to Lareine’s last tour in August 2000. (I met Cameron there for the first time)
 
By maybe 2002-ish most of the file sharing was happening on the P2P networks, and Livejournal was becoming popular. I moved to Tokyo in early 2002. Go was living in Tokyo too and documenting the scene on JrockNYC. It would be nice to read it again but I don’t think his old stuff is on line any more. This is getting to the time period where there are lots of people who were around to remember, so I’ll leave it.

Gotten a couple of CDs over the past few weeks, but I've been too lazy to take pics lately.
 
Also, here's my proudest acquistion yet - I managed to find Gara and Nero (Merry)'s old band After effect's VHS tape on Mercari and THANK GAWD I was able to buy it through Buyee. I don't know what it contains since the tape isn't labeled with anything (no release date either) but the band name and I have no VHS player to actually play it ;w; Theoretically, I believe it features the live video of "レトール" (which was already shared on Nico or Youtube iirc) but I could be wrong.
 

 

Their single [Dracula] will be released on 2019.10.xx.
 

Vocalist: Sui
 

Guitarist: Yuhma
 

Bassist: 70.
 

Drummer: Tomoya

Yeah they're not bad! Definitely worth having a listen to more of their stuff if you can. A really nice blend of being heavier but retaining that typical melodious side of V Kei as well which not many bands seem to balance quite as well. (in my opinion anyway, often is a bit black and white with a lot of bands) But tbh I lost interest a bit in them after their full length, not that it was a bad album but just all seemed pretty samey, so feeling like I have enough Verxina to keep me occupied for a while, so unless they release anything exceptionally amazing it'll probably stay that way. But the two singles and full length are enjoyable at least if you're interested in them.

Just watched their two PVs; I actually really like this band! But that might just be because their PVs look/sound like they could have been released in like 2008-2009 and I'm a slut for that era lmfao. Their look reminds me of Nega or something, I really dig it. 

Just watched their two PVs; I actually really like this band! But that might just be because their PVs look/sound like they could have been released in like 2008-2009 and I'm a slut for that era lmfao. Their look reminds me of Nega or something, I really dig it. 

Yeah, when I saw them last year he was really struggling with those high screeches but otherwise good performance so no real compaints from me. But tbh, I wouldn't expect someone to be able to pull those off flawlessly every time. lol. But from what I can tell from their latest releases that Sho is stepping away a bit from all the grunting and screeching and focusing a lot more on actual singing so maybe he's already aware he's fucking his voice up so is trying to calm it down a bit. 

+ On the topic of him being a Kyo clone, I don't really agree that he's a clone at all. Only thing that's really similar is he goes for the same kind of range, mixing up the gutturals, screams and clean singing, but that could be said for a lot of V Kei vocalists surely? Doesn't make them a clone of Kyo for using different vocal styles, I welcome it in fact, a vocalist who doesn't have any variation can be pretty monotonous and tiresome to listen to.

Haha this thread is gold. I'm with the guy/girl who said they're happy they stay away from the fandom and just happy enjoying the music and not getting involved in all the weird drama. Only thing I really would say is a lot of V Kei fans in general I've seen at live shows in Japan and overseas seem pretty weird and immature (everyone here seems pretty safe though, so not firing any shots at anyone) like they just turn 10/15 younger and start acting like over-excited hyper babies and it's really pathetic to see. Always nice to see people having a good time, but they're so OTT it's properly cringey. For example, at one Dir show I was standing behind a girl who appeared to be on her own, she was quite short and I'm quite tall so just happened to notice what she was writing on her phone as she was texting a friend. Conversation starts off fairly normal "just got to the gig, am at the front woop, woop" that kind of thing, "I bought a load of merch woop woop" also pretty normal, (here i'll add she's clearly not an experienced gig go-er as she brings her massive ass backpack and puts it on the floor in front of her at the front of a show.... (got to be kidding right? Nope, haha) and anyway, things start getting weird when I then notice a message as obviously I wasn't watching everything she was writing as got talking to some people around, "How do I confess my love to Kaoru from the second row of the audience?" and then kept bad mouthing his wife saying she's a "gremlin" and that Kaoru should be with her instead, keeping in mind she was also very young, no older than 18 I'm sure..... But even still, a lot of V Kei fans seem this obsessed and it's so cringe it almost hurts. haha. I've been involved in music for around 20 years and mixed with all kinds of audiences and played in loads of bands of varying styles etc and ONLY seen this ridiculous behaviour at V Kei shows. Obviously the odd weirdo will appear anywhere so not saying all other genres you don't get weirdos but yeah, V Kei has a pretty creepy fanbase. lol.

Sounds like that one girl from central America who claimed Yoshiki, Kamijo, Mana and idk who else would possess her in her dreams and perform satanic rituals on her and shit. She went on about it for so long that Yoshiki has been known as "the satanic hag" on Hispanic VK for years now.