gret

lame. give me the makeup fantasy i crave.

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If anything I feel like Sho uses growls when it fits the lyrics. Kyo, on the other hand, often seems like he just randomly makes noises. 

no one:
security question options/topics:
 

Nice! 
 
Also there is new beef with Kaitou and the band Asty! I have to look at it more a bit later. 
 
 
If someone wants to translate meanwhile, be my guest

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.

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Shinee is the one kpop group I listen to. Tried others, but can't get into it. Key's solo album is great! their overall image is a little bland for me though.
 
Vk is just a close relative of kpop tbh (remember when dbsk had visual kei hairstyles? lol)
 
Ignoring my shinee bias, I prefer deep resounding voices generally and kpop doesn't really provide for that
 

Played "love thyself- a horatio story" - an april's fool joke that turned real. If you want to play a short dating sim where you, a clone, get together with other clones of you, this is for you.
 
...that aside, the endless series of strategy games are great (endless legend, endless space etc)

Shinee is the one kpop group I listen to. Tried others, but can't get into it. Key's solo album is great! their overall image is a little bland for me though.
 
Vk is just a close relative of kpop tbh (remember when dbsk had visual kei hairstyles? lol)
 
Ignoring my shinee bias, I prefer deep resounding voices generally and kpop doesn't really provide for that
 

I tried listening to vanitas - white- and just burst out laughing in public. Some parts were really nice, but this is weird. I'm scrapping my fantasy of having Sho whisper in my ear. 

Kagrra, - うたかた
Janne Da Arc - RED ZONE
La'cryma Christi - 未来航路 (?)
L'Arc~en~Ciel - Blurry Eyes
メリー - ジャパニーズモダニスト
PIERROT - MAD SKY? ADOLF? クリア・スカイ? 脳内モルヒネ? too many
Plastic Tree - 絶望の丘
Psycho le Cému - 愛の唄
SHAZNA - Melty Love
 

I think most vocalists, if they've been around long enough, will end up sounding different from the beginning. 
If they start young especially, since your voice usually matures quite a bit going from your 20's into your 30's. If you take Takeru from Clack inc., his tone and style isn't that dramatically different from what he used to sound like in EVE, but the voice itself has definitely matured in an almost 10-year gap. 
 
However, if you take Yuu in the Zodia days, his style, tone and technique is extremely different compared to what he sounds like nowadays. That to me is more of a conscious change rather than natural evolution , since back in the day he was heavily inspired by Jonathan Davis' vocal style and that fit the nu metal vibe of Zodia pretty well. Then in Ultimate Sonic, Affective Synergy etc. he has a more "classic" vk approach, also his vocal technique has overall improved a lot throughout the years and it shows. That isn't to say that his style in Zodia was "bad", not at all, it was really unique and his growls there are some of the best out there imho. But yeah, if you compare Zodia to Ultimate Sonic it doesn't even sound like the same person (unless you know it is) 
 
Another one whose vocal evolution has been a conscious one rather than natural evolution is Mahiro. If you listen to his previous bands before Kiryu, you'll see how much his overall sound and style has changed. His vocals in Kiryu are very polarizing, some hate it and some love it (personally I'm not the biggest fan, even though I can commend him for being good at what he does), but if you compare it to what he used to sound like in Madara you'll be able to tell that these it's a heavily crafted, specific style he's going for rather than his "natural" way of singing. He went from sounding like your run-of-the-mill vk vocalist to one of the most unique and recognizable voices in the scene and an irreplaceable element to Kiryu's sound. 
 
Tl;dr: most vocalists are bound to change their style throughout the years, whether it's natural evolution (or devolution) or conscious change. But most likely, if they've been around for long enough, no one will stay the same. 
It is definitely interesting to highlight and analyze the differences though. 

Regarding to Kamijo, I don't think it can be said that he simply changed his vocal range and that's it. Rather, I think Kamijo changed his range because he learned how to sing properly. That is to say, he realized that songs like Lareine's (tenor range) are not suitable at all for his own natural range (clearly baritone). This is easy to prove to anyone who listens just to a single Lareine song. And in fact I think it was clear to Kamijo himself ; in fact, several songs from Lareine's repertoire were tuned down for live performances. Check "Metamorphose" as an example:
 
Album version (on C minor key)
 
 
 
Live version (on B minor key, and also an epic performance)
 
 
However, Kamijo might be still heard not so comfortable. Add to this the feminine and in-pain characterization that Kamijo tried to build for his on-stage persona. What you get is a voice that sounds like choked, it is clear that he is making a huge effort to be able to reach every high note. Also, I think that Kamijo smoked at that time, right? Much worse.

Either way, Kamijo had a very good vocal performance in Lareine. Not only because he always kept himself into the key (which in visual kei is like asking a lot lol), but because, despite all this I said, he managed to keep a flow of voice that was voluminous, and all that while charaterizing it in a very convincing and beautiful way.
Either way, fortunately he has decided to adjust to his natural range since Versailles began. His voice now sounds much more natural and versatile; he even can reach the tenor notes, which as I said are not natural for him, through some falsetto, which is actually heard very nice and dramatic.
 
I think the same can be said regarding Gackt. Check the following "Mizerable"versions:
 
Album version (on key of D flat minor)
 
 
Live version (on key of C minor)
 
Now there are other vocalists, that actually improved over the time, but in the beggining didn't try to lie to themselves proving that their range was higher than what their throats could actually offer without killing themselves into the process lol
 
Ruki have always had a beautiful voice and a decent technic, but I feel that songs like "Wakaremichi" or "Miseinen" sounds legitly good nowadays. Ruki now can manage to run trough the different notes and volumes very smoothly, while managing to bring out a strong flow of voice, even while delivering this gothic-inspired deep voice that is one of the trademarks of the 'visual kei' sound, but that makes singers of the scene really -like, REALLY- bad 90% of the times.
 
Album version (2002):
 
 
Live version (2012, and also another epic performance)
 
 
Also, Miku from Antic Cafe and Asagi from D can other great examples of vocal improving.

Their new single will be released this winter.
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

I really thought Vanitas -White- and Aizounitsuki -Black- were gonna be fully fleshed out acoustic remakes, that was kind of a bummer.

As of 2019.10.20, the band will go on hiatus !
The reason is that the drummer SIN has been seeing a doctor because of a painful arm so the band want to focus on his recovery.
 
 

GCMZ will end activities at 2019/9/9.

The album is up on spotify now.

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.

I honestly forget this was here, but goddamn, I need y'all. 
 
So my ex kept a good number of my possessions, including my computer and my backup, changed my passwords to my cloud storage and a lot of my social media, but by some stroke of luck, not this one.
 
I know it's been years since I've been here, but I am so thankful my account is still here. I am so thankful posts that shaped my life are still here. 
Even if no one reads this, I am thankful this hasn't been deleted. 
I've forgotten more bands/albums/songs that I think last.fm/spotify could ever imagine, but they're still here.
 
I love this. I'm gonna try to be here to preserve this bit of my life. I work alot and support myself and my wife (surprise! I'm actually a lesbian), but I want to be here. 
Please don't remove anything.
 
Love,
Bhani, aka Ana, aka Velvet.

So with DEG announcing a US tour I was just reminded of this girl who ran a Vkei panel at a local anime convention here once. I thought she seemed cool, but all she talked about was Gackt and his personal drama, then she talked about the one time DEG came to Utah and how she sort of stalked them at the mall and was so 'mad that Kyo didn't come out to socialize with them'. 
 
If I knew there were fans out there like her, which he most likely does, if I were Kyo I'd NEVER go out.

https://m.imgur.com/gallery/RJzq8AT
 
Just saw this pop up on my feed. Interesting...

I'd say a healthy dose of both, lel
 
Honestly, something like this would be the absolute dream.


Thank you so much to all of you who took the time to read this, I'm so glad it went over well! Eventually I'd like to write about the old roadie/mentor system in VK (but it's been a pain in the ass to research), or do an archive of the older legends/rumors of VK (easy to research but probably going to take 100,000 words to write it all out), it was very encouraging to see that people were actually interested in this piece since it was my first crack at this kind of thing.

I've been wanting to write some of this stuff out forever because I'm a huge digital packrat and I like to archive these types of things... I don't think any of this has been written out anywhere before, but I'm not sure how much people actually care about the fan culture part of VK here, especially the Japanese fan culture, and especially the online Japanese fan culture. But, just in case any of you are also level 50 Turbo Nerds I thought I should post it here. I hope this is a sensible place to put it??

this piece is WAY too long for how lame the subject is and i'm so sorry
tl;dr: tanuki is old as fuck and there used to be another tanuki and forums are dead, long live tanuki

edit: fixed a number i screwed up