Wonrei
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Posts posted by Wonrei
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Well bands like DEAD END were obviously inspired by western glam metal bands. What I've read from interviews, bands like BUCK-TICK were mostly inspired by bands like Bauhaus, the Cure and mostly David Bowie. Tbqh I think Bowie himself also had quite an influence when it comes to late 80s/early 90s VK.
Yeah, Bowie sure had his influence, I mean Boowy was a really important band in the vk scheme. And look at their name!
Dead end was only inspired by glam on the looks, tho. Early sound was more like 70's heavy metal and later sound is The Mission/The Cult gothic pop rock everywhere
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This subject deserved its own thread. We've been trying to discuss this on too many different places.
Here I thought we could try to understand the whole history behind visual kei(and along with it, japan's 80s and 90s rock and pop come along, I guess). For years we've had really bad wiki texts trying to write about visual kei and failing along with it. To abridge the entire scope of the visual kei scene to only "a bunch of guys influenced by glam metal" like every copy-pasted lastfm biography says means next to nothing. Here we had for the late 80s and 90s bands playing speed metal, gothic rock and new wave and they were all part of the same scene. Some bands mixed these genres, others played only one of these, and there were even bands that introduced other stuff in the mix - but all of them using the strong visual element as the way to hit their message. As much as I tried to find, it's hard to see a scene as convoluted and intriguing anywhere else in the world.
My idea is to mostly focus on late 70's, 80's and 90's japanese music and the western influences, trying to guess how it became what it was and what it is today. Maybe to try to answer a question that never really goes away on japanese music boards: A scene or a genre?
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Of course today's bands have been more varied, but early visual kei is what we're mostly talking about in this thread. And early visual kei managed to combine some lots of genres... it wasn't a genre itself, I believe. Or maybe it was? It has enough elements to be called so. But I'm not sure. We had influences from lots of things man, not only Kiss. Kiss was sure an influence in X Japan an the likes, but the visual kei sonority - those guitars, those basslines, the melodies hailing straight from 80's and 90's jpop were a hybrid of many different genres. Of course each band also had their own way of interpreting the sound, some going more metal(speed and power metal with a little glam were bases for many of the earlier visual bands, like X, Gargoyle, Gastunk, early Dead End), others more inspired by goth rock, post-punk and deathrock(Luna Sea, Kuroyume, later Dead End, D'erlanger) and even poppier stuff(Boowy, early Buck-tick,Glay, Sophia) with roots in new wave and the explosion of the so called J-POP on the 80's. Hell even J-pop is a really complicated job - how did japan went from enka and a thousand of folk bands to playing an style highly similar to what was in the 80's west but with these really different melodies, taking cues from jazz fusion and new wave? Jesus, japan's recent music history deserved some kind of further study, it's all really messed up.
All right, I think I should create a thread for this. We're just going to move the subject too far. After it is created could the mods please move all these posts from people here to the new thread? So everything gets in the right place.
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^Maybe I could do something like that. I spent quite some years trying to understand the origins of VK, so I could try to explain the whole mix of goth rock/post punk/new wave/speed/power metal/glam rock that we call visual kei. If anyone wants to help it would be great tho. I'll try writing it later today
And yeah, I'd mention Siouxsie too. A band where their influence is quite noticeable is Zi:Kill...
And I'd like to leave this specific Cure song here, as when I first listened to it I was amazed at how much the whole song reminded me of visual kei
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It's interesting to note the involvement of Japan with the actual japanese country... I mean, Masami Tsuchiya was their member for a while and they were pretty famous there. Ippu Do in a sense probably carried many of those influences over and brought them to the japanese scene.
I'd also bring The Mission and (early)The Cult/Southern Death Cult to the table. Both had this weird mix of goth rock, hard rock and pop that would influence a lot later Dead End and the bands that came following their later sound, like early L'arc~en~ciel and even some Luna Sea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsB9UOZKG3I
This song by The Mission for example reminds me so much of something you'd be able to hear on Dead End's Zero or L'arc's Dune.(sorry for the quality, all the studio versions seem to have been deleted from youtube)I'd also maybe mention some hard rock/AOR bands because that was definitely an influence to bands like Siam Shade, Dead End and Janne Da Arc. maybe l8r
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^I actually get huge ambient vibes. I mean, for most of the song you can barely notice kyo is there, he is almost like another instrument. And the song is just "there", there aren't any climaxes or anything it just goes on and on. It's very ambient in those senses. And the folk vibes are specially noticeable on the "bridge" (if you can call 3:00 that). wonder how the other songs on the ep sound like
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yeah, by the setlists they didn't even play daemon's cutlery (the song we just listened to). the sets were probably acoustic only and have that folk atmosphere. I mean, deg has some varied range of songs on their albums, why wouldn't kyo's side band have it too?
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I don't really think that's a live recording. Even though it sounds like one, it may just be someone recording the ep playing as they can't properly rip it. Specially because the live set was acoustic, there was no electric guitar like the ones you can clearly hear on this track. (the ep is on vinyl, if you guys don't know)
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these guys need to learn how to do some proper rip instead of recording their vinyl playing
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it has the screams, but the overall vibe is totally different from deg. but kyo loves doind whatever the fuck he wants with the vox so it's explainable. it reminds me of this weird mix of funk metal and nagoya bands.
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Some people claim to have recognized Yuchi from kannivalism as the bassist in Sukekiyo.
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June? That's a shitload of time
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Just a reminder that the luna sea song everyone claims to be plagiarized by everyone on vk ever is also a copy lel
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Not many old vk demos come to my mind right now, but this one is a big favorite:
Noisy Crowds - 水色の太陽/サ・ン・ダ・ル
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7SuCw9HY_s
Mostly because of this song. This one features almost everything I liked about old school visual kei, too bad their later sound would really stray from this. What a shame.
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they're a pretty good band, have listened to them for a while now. hope they have luck in this, it's hard to be popular in the u.s.
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If it's like Rinkaku, January. Second week is my guess.
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Well, at least they changed the capitalization. I'm glad. And those covers.... Now I just don't have the slightly idea of what this shit is going to sound like
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all previews
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I didn't mention anywhere it was about how fast they are releasing stuff... vk bands always shit 30 releases per year. It's just that every release by these guys until now was just all this cover-fest mess. I don't know, I just look forward to them because they're the closest to an old school revival thing that has happened until now.
It's just the inner me hoping something similar to what happens with new wave and post-punk on the west happens with vk: some small bands releasing lo-fi oldschool inspired releases. No one trying tho
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If they actually wanted to get something like... A PERSONALITY maybe I'd listen to them
But come on, we already have enough covers
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one last thing before the upload: antlion pit live @ shibuya ax
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyRI1SCT-C8
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Frankly enough, the "campy" influence of DEG comes through Kaoru (constant nu metal / deathcore riffage, that is).
as shown through their BGMs, Kaoru probably listens to everything, and he has probably been listening to downy and this kind of band for long. It's not like they are suddenly going to start influencing deg or anything. And something that actually makes it interesting is how deg is inspired by really different kinds of music: deathcore, prog metal, nu metal, death metal, and everything else
deg's next album is probably going to be just really straightforward, no proggyness, according to interviews, perhaps some sort of withering to death pt 2
if you considered their influences, kyo doesn't even listen to metal if I remember right. He's into Japan, Bauhaus, this kind of stuff. Yet deg still make metal
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japan edition was released 20... 6 days ago
it's already out and no one noticed it? top lel
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DIR EN GREY new single "SUSTAIN THE UNTRUTH" release
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Generally, that's the idea. But most deg pvs aren't actually shown on tv or anything, so that line of thought falls flat. I'd say that deg's PVs are more "music videos" than "promotional videos". They're there so the guys can express their artistic stuff or whatever.