Cereal Killer 13

Soooo MERRY just announced that Kenichi (guitars) will be leaving the band in May 2020.   A final tour is in the works as five-piece. Afterwards, MERRY will continue with four members (no word yet on whether they will recruit a support or fulltime 2nd guitarist).
 
Announcement on YT:
 
Message from the band:
 
Jesus, this sucks... they've been practically together without any member changes for almost 20 years... Hoping for the best!

Here's all the ones I follow that aren't already listed
PELICAN FANCLUB - pelicanfanclub
FAR EAST MENTION MANNEQUINS - femm____
Role - roleistheband
DOGGY HOOD$ - doggyhoodscult
Country Yard - countryyard
Inception of Genocide - inception_of_genocide
SWANKY DANK - swankydank_official
MY FIRST STORY - myfirststoryofficial
GRAND MASTER - grandmaster_jp
ONE OK ROCK - oneokrockofficial
THE MORTAL - the_mortal2015
TOWA TEI - towatei
wrong city - wrongcity
ARTEMA - artemaofficial
COAST TO COAST - coasttocoastjpn
WANIMA - wanima_wanima
Parasana - parasanajp
RIZE - rize_official
MAKE MY DAY - makemydayjapan
SURVIVE SAID THE PROPHET - survivesaidtheprophet
CLEAVE - cleave_jp
LOYAL TO THE GRAVE - loyaltothegrave
LOST - lostjapan
HER NAME IN BLOOD - hnibband
Crossfaith - crossfaithjapan
BEFORE MY LIFE FAILS - bmlftokyo
coldrain - coldrain_official
CRYSTAL LAKE - crystallake777
Ken LLoyd (Oblivion Dust/FAKE?) - kenlloyd_foa
Kouryu (ex My BACTERIA HEAT IsLAND) - kry_u
Reiki (LOUD GRAPE) - loudgrape_reiki
Ryuichiro Narumi (HEAD PHONES PRESIDENT) - narumixhpp
Hiro (ex FACT) - herovox
Tomohiro (ex FACT) - factomo
Adam (ex FACT) - adskillz
Eiji (ex FACT) - ekkkkn
Yuichi (SWANKY DANK) - swanky_dank_yuchi
Shun (SWANKY DANK) - shun_swankydank
Koji (SWANKY DANK) - koji_swanky_dank
Kota (SWANKY DANK) kota_swankydank
Taama (ROACH) - roach_taama
Daisukie (ROACH) - daisuke_drums
Godri (SiM) - simgodri
Sin (SiM) - yureneiro
Mah (SiM) - mahfromsim
Yuki Miyamoto (Country Yard) - yuki1986miyamoto
Hayato (Country Yard) - countryyard_hyt
Masack (MY FIRST STORY) - masackdrum
Nob (MY FIRST STORY) - nob_fromus_mfs
Teru (MY FIRST STORY) - teru0528
Sho (MY FIRST STORY) fromus_mfs
Tatsuya Yamamoto (Ender) - tatsuya_ender
Atsushi Oj (Ender) - at_ender
Morinaga (LOST) - morinagalost
Daisuke (LOST) - lostchandai
Tomohiro (waterweed) - tomohiro_ohga
Kohei Ogawa (ARTEMA) - kohey_artema
Kaz (ARTEMA) - kaztema
Takeshi (SECRET 7 LINE) - ttv_s7l
U-ske (MAKE MY DAY) - u_ske_mmd
Yoko (UNLIMITS) - unlimits_yoko
Alex (Parasana) - alex_parasana
Masato (coldrain) - masato_coldrain
Sugi (coldrain) - sugi_coldrain
Katsuma (coldrain) - katsuma_drums
Ryo (coldrain) - coldrain_rxyxo_bass
Kaoru (Vision of Fatima) - iamreindeer
After (Visuon of Fatima) - vof_after
Tomoya (ONE OK ROCK) - tomo10969
Toru (ONE OK ROCK) - toru_10969
Ryota (ONE OK ROCK) ryota_0809
Taka (ONE OK ROCK) 10969taka
Jose (TOTALFAT) - jose.totalfat
Shun (TOTALFAT) - totalfat.shun
Bunta (TOTALFAT) buntatf
Takuma (10 FEET) - takumamitamura
Hayato (MEANING) - evilhayato666
Shige (HARVEST) - harvestshige
Yudai (SURVIVE SAID THE PROPHET) - yudai_sstp
Ivan (SURVIVE SAID THE PROPHET) - kwongivan
Yosh (SURVIVE SAID THE PROPHET) - yosh_sstp
Hiroki (Crossfaith) - hirocrossfaith
Tatsuya (Crossfaith) - tatsucrossfaith
Kenta Koie (Crossfaith) - kencrossfaith
Teru (Crossfaith) - terucrossfaith
Kazuki (Crossfaith) - kazucrossfaith
Sam (MAKE MY DAY) - sammmdvo
Julian (MAKE MY DAY) - julian0114
Victor (wrong city) - itovictorkotaro
Ryosuke (a crowd of rebellion) - ryosukeacor
YD (CRYSTAL LAKE) - yd___
Shinya (CRYSTAL LAKE) - shinyahori
Ryo (CRYSTAL LAKE) - ryo_crystallake
Gaku (CRYSTAL LAKE/HONE YOUR SENSE/SOULJAPAN) - gakutaura
Teru (CRYSTAL LAKE) - terutheproven
Ikepy (HER NAME IN BLOOD) - ikepy_hnib
Daiki (HER NAME IN BLOOD) - daikihnib
TJ (HER NAME IN BLOOD) - tj_hnib
Umebo (HER NAME IN BLOOD) - umeboshigeki_hnib
Makoto (HER NAME IN BLOOD) - makotohnib
Nob (BEFORE MY LIFE FAILS) - nob_bmlf
Shinji (BEFORE MY LIFE FAILS) - shinji_bmlf
Kazuki (BEFORE MY LIFE FAILS) - kazukibmlf
May come back for a second post of even more no1curr bandmen/artist accounts but for now these are some of my faves.

gackt

dove they're literally protecting themselves from getting gutted by a stray gya with a paper knife,
 
western celebs can afford bodyguards x

Dumbasses thinking that they can get away with smoking Weed and then getting caught...
 
This ain't the US.
 
Stop it. 

This is the merch for the rest of the tour. No longsleeves for us .__.

Not gonna lie, that hoodie made jelly as fuck.

They're the worst band in history

Funny that Loki was in Sugar and went on to form More. 
 
Also don’t forget D. 

Yuuga topped this with naming a session "THE." . 

Also make sure your band name is easy to Google. Don’t make it one letter or a super common word like “Sugar”

Wow this is better and more than what america got I'm jealous 

he's such a miserable low-vibrational aquarius I can't @ all that brain purge 
 
nvm I'm surprised they don't have enough JSL Matts in American embassy over there, but I'd have assumed "I fuck your daughter on your grave" is an acceptable career inquiry response?..
 

Thinking about this thread again because I tried to find 蟻‘s (Ari) singles on Cdjapan and it returned only Ariana Grande in my search, confirming that she really is the one responsible for vkei being unpopular 

That sucks as translating stuff can be time consuming depending on what it is. I wonder why fans for some bands wouldn't care?
 
As for getting non vkei metal fans into the bands I see where you are coming from.  I was a "normal" metal fan stumbled onto some vkei acts by coincidence (read an article on Miyavi in a graffiti magazine I used to read). It wasn't introduced to me by another fan or a weird Japan sort of way. I'm pretty open minded though. I will say that now I listen to way more non vkei Japanese bands. If you think vkei fandoms are quiet, move on to Jrock outside of vkei....cue crickets 😣 

@ this whole thread
 

you have to pay ten dollars to leave???

I'd be more active if there was more discussion on bands outside of vkei. A lot of the time I'll search for specific bands and I see that they have fans here but there are never topics made about them.  I came out of lurking because of a non vkei band having a thread made about two of the members. 

this may be off topic but this topic reminds me of what i always wanted to say about mh.
 
idk what we overseas fans can do to make vk more popular than what it is, but one thing i think doable is to make mh become more popular.
vk may be dead one day but mh should live on after that. personally i always see mh as a very underrated japanese music forum that has high potential to grow bigger.
 
if the stats on similarweb aren't lying, it's very impressive that we have around 1.3m page views monthly (from 200k total visits * 6.6 page views per a visit). what i mean is mh already has a huge user base in hands but the engagements of the content on the forum are a lot less compared to it. for example, we have very few concurrent registered users online as you can see from the image below. it's only ~20 members online. (700 guests are mostly crawlers i believe). i know that it's taken at a random time of a day but usually it's still not significantly more than this either considering we have over 9.6k members registered. additionally, we can have more followers on facebook and twitter from our daily visitors if we want to. (it hurts to see that mh which is the source of almost everything japanese rock related has far less likes than random j-rock pages on facebook even demon android's one.)
 

 
moreover, traditional forum software like IPB is kinda 2000-ish, but i'm just saying. i have nothing against it. IPB is not bad though. it regularly gets updates and bug fixes. but nowadays there are a number of better open source alternatives as well; e.g. discourse and nodebb. converting the database from one to another is such a pain though if we ever do it.
 
sysops are one of the most important roles that almost nobody notices the effort they put behind the scenes. we have had only 3-4 sysops since the inception of mh and now there is only one left. it's a vital position that needs to recruit too. what'd we do if they're all gone? it'd even mean the end of mh. (not sure about how recruiting a new sysop is going, but it seems difficult to get one to begin with.)
 
at the end of the day, staff are all volunteers. finding a suitable staff member who is willing to spend their free time is hard already but finding one who is dedicated to the community is even harder. one day the current staff members will be rotated as well. so we're not going anywhere if we don't expand the user base. we can find more talented people from a bigger one.
 
this is my two cents:
 
it's time for mh 4.0. sooner or later mh has  to change too. otherwise, the community will be gone if we don't do something beforehand. if i were the founder, i'd rebrand "monochrome-heaven" to something else shorter, easier to type and pronounce, and easy to remember esp for non-english natives. having a dash (-) in a domain name looks unprofessional for a brand imo. just like when "thefacebook.com" becoming "facebook.com". the former is not a professional brand name compared to the latter. they bought it once they had the money to afford it and became the "facebook" we know nowadays.
 
rebranding mh may be too much for those who're familiar with the name but it'd be a big step to be known better. by rebranding i mean changing the look of the forum too whether it be a new skin or even new forum software that's more modern. we can still stick with vk just like before and be more open to the general japanese rock scene which is more lively and has a wider fanbase like ruling it all online not only on here but also on other social networks.
 
yeah, i know that it's easier said than done. it takes a lot of effort and is very challenging to accomplish, but knowing the potential mh has not being used is wasting as well.

That might apply if they were trying for the bro-metal scene.
 
Post-hardcore/metal-core was a different beast entirely.

Yo thanks. I had no idea about this. A lot of non vkei Japanese bands I listen to have done Warped, some more than once. They most certainly have a better approach to touring overseas. A lot of my favorites have pretty much made Europe their second home. 

That really speaks volumes on the whole deal. I'm very used to the concept of bands partnering with other bands (or, in some cases, just riding their coattails) to gain a following in the States, so to see just how dramatic the difference in thought is kind of amuses me - especially in a genre that, we can all probably agree, produces a lot of cookie-cutter artists at a rapid fire pace. 

Agreed. They could have had an important ally in someone like Kevin, but even MUCC, D’espairsRay and The Underneath’s management teams messed that up by screwing him over while he was planning the Canadian leg of that tour.

Somewhere along the line, they told him that they weren’t doing the Canadian dates, which caused him to try and scramble to salvage something to no avail. The attendance at his Canadian shows never recovered, and Taste of Chaos only lasted one more year, with record low attendance.
 
He’s invited other Japanese bands onto Warped Tour after that, but *never* another VK band.