Zeus

If you want an approximate count for that, look for how many views a release has.

How would you be able to determine the amount of fans who showed up to see that particular band and not one of the other head lining bands? Any band can pump out releases, but popular bands would tend to sell more. If it's a limited release, you could try to figure out if the band sold out of all of the copies they pressed. If they end up pressing second or third editions that's a good sign. That would be introducing bias into your data set because it would be restricted to vkgy users, which may not encapsulate the scene as it stands in Japan.

Yeah, they've always been like that. Let's say I'm cautiously excited. ZIN was a problem with the band but he was far from the problem, and I don't think swapping out the vocalist will fix everything magically.

Welcome! It's been a few months since we did a recap of some quality songs we've been enjoying lately. Lots of great releases have come out this spring, so here's what we recommend checking out if you haven't heard it already. If there's anything we missed, leave it below! @plastic_rainbow's pick "煙突の街" (Entotsu no machi) by 首振りDolls (Kubuhuri Dolls) @helcchi's picks "vanitas" by DIMLIM "he waits patiently" by ichika "開花" (Kaika) by DEVILOOF ”NEW ERA” by DEXCORE "デリヘル呼んだら君が来た" (Deriheru Yondara Kimi ga Kita) by XYZ production @qotka's picks ”のろいうた” (Noroi Uta) by ザアザア "自己嫌悪" (Jikoken'o) by MUCC @emmny's picks "いつか変われる頃" (Itsuka kawareru koro) by MIZTAVLA "いただきます。" (Itadakimasu.) by マチルダ "TWO OF A KIND" by the GazettE "アリア-Aria-" by The THIRTEEN @tetsu_sama69's picks "AGUL" by 零[Hz] (Zero[Hz]) "蜉蝣と僕等." (Kagerou to Bokura.) by Sick. "死因:わからん" (Shiin: Wakaran) by まみれた (Mamireta) @fitear1590's picks "Langage" by 水曜日のカンパネラ & Moodoïd (Wednesday Campanella & Moodoïd) "Asphyxia" by Cö Shu Nie "アヴァリティアリティ" (Avaritiarity) by グリモア (Grimoire) @Zeus's picks "Ash" by Dir en grey "覇王"(Haou) by 陰陽座 (Onmyouza) Thanks for reading!

I took you up on that offer and I still hear no muddiness . If I want, I can pick out any instrument and follow along almost effortlessly in TWO OF A KIND. There are moments when fuzzy synth comes in and out and that masks more sibilant sounds like the cymbals, but I don't hear muddiness. What qualities are you all referring to when you say muddy?

| One of the best GazettE albums in recent memory. I can't believe it's been three years since DOGMA. It feels like I just finished roasting it for being the "most underwhelming album of the year" and "ARCHE, Iowa-era Slipknot, and a quarter of DIM shoved in a blender and served cold". To be fair, most of my criticisms came from how stale and similar all the songs felt; the result of going a bit too far in the metalcore direction. Ever the perfectionists, it seems that the band actually addressed all of my complaints with NINTH. By combining the dark and heavy nature of DOGMA with the electronic rock explored with TOXIC and DIVISION and the retro "Gaze-rock" style of BEAUTIFUL DEFORMITY, The GazettE have succeeded in delivering an experience that mixes old and new sounds. NINTH won't win you over if you don't like the direction of the last four albums. If you took more of an issue with the execution of those concepts, than this is what you've been waiting for since DIM. It's been a while since I feel comfortable recommending an album of theirs. NINTH is an easier and more engaging listening experience than DOGMA, with smooth, slick, and balanced production. I don't understand the criticisms of "muddy production" because I don't hear it. I even pulled out my good headphones - the Sennheiser HD600s - and plugged them straight into my Logitech speakers to pluck out minor grievances with the mix and it sounded better that way. This reaches a level that visual kei music can rarely afford to reach. Ruki has advised fans to get great audio equipment to experience each album to the fullest, but I think it's more true now than before. The songs are also arranged very well and flow into each other, and I can't recall a single jarring stylistic transition. All of these elements together makes every song an attractive listening experience. There's also the absence of several elements which used to drag down prior releases: the lack of standout tracks, filler, and clumsy Green Day-ish all English punk songs that stick out. The GazettE cut the fat out of this album in a way I wish Dir en grey could. An album can still have highlights even when it's consistently good. I can't end this review without naming my favorite tracks. The first would be "その声は脆く", a rock ballad which starts on an unassuming note before effortlessly sliding into a thick, melancholic atmosphere. It even has a (short) twin guitar solo, a staple of rock songs I've been missing from their music lately. The follow-up track, "Babylon's Taboo", creates the best one-two punch on NINTH. I could be convinced that this is a heavier take on an unreleased 9GOATS BLACK OUT song. "Falling" is the de facto single of the album, receiving the first music video to push the album, and there's a damn good reason why. "The Mortal" is another track that deserves a shout out for mixing some of NIL-era flavor in the chorus with DOGMA-style riffs in the breakdown, and serves as a great summary for the journey the album takes us on. If The GazettE were still releasing singles, this would have been the second one. NINTH makes a strong argument for keeping a low profile until an album is complete. Visual kei bands can capture my attention with rapid fire single releases, but that makes it harder to impress me with an album of familiar content. NINTH wouldn't be as impressive if they gave us previews and teasers months or years before it was done. I hope other bands are taking notes. If you haven't already, put some cash towards this worthy album. It will be favorably remembered for years to come. Support the artist! iTunes

I'm going to have to listen to the songs you've mentioned and get back to you. I reviewed this single without revisiting any of their other material. In the context of this single, everything sounds a little too similar for my tastes.

I'm really curious to know how you feel about the first track!

| How does a band that delivers the same music for over 15 years defy expectations? Like DEATHGAZE and lynch., 陰陽座 (Onmyouza) is that type of band that sticks to their guns and delivers the same style of music with each release. Also like DEATHGAZE and lynch., 陰陽座 (Onmyouza) is the kind of the band that won't do much to change your mind, no matter how many times they come knocking at your door with a new sales pitch. When I was a J-music novice, I thought being one-dimensional was a bad thing because I rated diversity much more highly than I probably should have, mostly due to the way many visual kei bands use diversity as a musical condiment. What is more important to me now is that a band delivers every time they announce a new song or album. While the two visual kei bands I mentioned earlier haven't been the paragons of consistency, 陰陽座 definitely is. There's not an album in their catalog that I would consider sub par - this is impressive with a career spanning almost twenty years and fifteen albums - and their newest album, 覇道明王, continues that trend. I'll take the time now and say that if what you've heard in the past has done nothing for you, just listen to the first track "覇王". If that does nothing for you, you are free to go. I have nothing to say that will change your mind. If, however, you have never heard of this band before or "覇王" actually caught your interest, then welcome to what is perhaps the most metal album ever. This feels like, but also far outstrips, 2007's 魔王戴天 (Maoutaiten). 覇道明王 has zero chill, and from the opening piano chords of "覇王" to the fading guitar of "無礼講", 覇道明王 has the potential to keep you hooked without wanting a pause. Unlike past albums, there's no token seven minute ballad to bore you to sleep, or attempts at infusing disparate genres like pop punk and classic rock into their distinct brand of heavy metal. It's straightforward, punishing, rewarding, and everything I never knew I really wanted from this band. Whenever I finish the intoxicating experience of listening to a new 陰陽座 album for the first time, I always wonder how the next one will surpass this one. They don't always manage to raise the bar, but they never completely shit the bed either. The last four albums in a row have consistently impressed me, but I don't think there's an album of theirs that's clicked as quickly as this one. Unfortunately, I cannot give it a perfect score because I believe it's a tad overwhelming for an initiate to sit through without wanting a breather. However, I'm confident in recommending this album to anyone that likes metal with subtle Japanese flair, dual female and male vocals, or just wants something new to listen to. This is as good of a place as any to jump in if you are unfamiliar with this band.

| A great white flash of nothing special. Every so often, I come across a single or an album that leaves me speechless. Whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on if my expectations were met. Despite my glowing review of RAZOR's first mini-album, their newest single "BRILLIANT" leaves me feeling cold. Strip away the visual kei conventions and I'm left with very little that I can associate uniquely with RAZOR. Listening to BRILLIANT is listening to a different take on the same three songs. Lead single "BRILLIANT" sounds like a bog-standard upbeat visual kei song with a misplaced breakdown. It's a boring track and a close cousin to the third track, "PINNOCHIO", but "PINNOCHIO" is way more interesting. I'd have flipped the track list and marketed this single as "PINNOCHIO", if the goal was to pilot something radio friendly. "HONEY" is the track for those looking for something to head bang to, with a groovy riff, but changing the key the song is composed in doesn't change the way it was constructed. It could be so much more than it is. No matter how much this band is divorced from any previous bands, I expect the lessons learned to carry over. If I limit the scope of this conversation to just BORN, I'm confident in saying that BORN were way more adventurous in the genres they were inspired by and put into their music. The result wasn't always great, but they tried. I need RAZOR to find that same interest, and I'm not only talking about the genre. Give me a solo instead of a breakdown, take more time to develop the introduction to a song, amp up the electronic effects or strip them entirely, or even start the song off with the chorus immediately. Even doing small things can help to give each song an identity. This has sounded like a very negative review, but I assure you that there's still something here for the modern visual kei fan to dig into. I am personally just hoping for more. RAZOR is one of the few bands on the scene I have any type of emotional connection to, so I want to see them succeed. In order for that to happen, I'm going to need to see some progression. "HONEY" and "PINNOCHIO" are passable, but I'm looking for a stronger showing from their lead single.

I never knew I wanted a thread so bad in my life.

This is all true. What I meant to say is that we should define our own reasons for why we pirate. I should have clarified that.

NOT THIS TOPIC AGAIN! Relax, it's not what you think. If you guys remember this topic - and I'm sure most of you do - then you will remember that I made a proposal at the end of it. What I said I wanted to observe was the effect of "our" piracy - our as in Monochrome Heaven - on visual kei sales, using the GazettE's newest album "NINTH" as the benchmark. Some of you really took this suggestion to heart, and others thought I was making a bad joke. I wasn't. There's something to be said for testing even the most obvious of conclusions because sometimes the results can surprise you, but the results of this did not. I knew that this album would leak and make its way here well under the two weeks I specified. Next time someone restarts the discussion of supporting our favorite bands by not pirating their music, point them to this topic and remind them that the Internet is a very large place and that shouting your demands in one corner of it isn't going to change what happens where your voice and influence can't reach. Not even mine. It's good to know that we are not the center of the visual kei universe. We have some influence and we do our part to keep the show going, but if we were to disappear tomorrow, I don't think the show would stop. That is ultimately a good thing. The scene needs to spread if it wants to stay alive. It seems pretty obvious but its worth reiterating. For what it's worth, the album didn't appear here first so it's not like we are the alpha and the omega to all of the woes our favorite bands go through. The conclusion that I can draw from this failed social experiment is that we need a better definition of what "piracy" actually is. There are reasons why the international scene depends on piracy, so to make future discussions more useful we should find as many different reasons as we can and the distribution within the scene. To that end, I've attached an anonymous poll to the top of this post. If you are interested, vote for the option that fits your situation the best, and if there isn't one (and you don't mind), share your specific reasons below. I'll leave this topic open until the end of the month so you guys can share your thoughts and opinions.

Let's make a poll and see how the whole forum feels. This sounds like it has potential.

In my opinion, there even being a divide between "international" and "local" fans is the root of an entirely different problem. Fans are fans, no matter where they may live, and we live in a time where the world is becoming increasingly interconnected. There's a distinction in my mind between a local artist who has their music internationally available (example: a rapper promoting his first mix tape on sound cloud) and an international artist only promoting their music locally (example: fan-club limited CD's a la cali≠gari). Even if a local artist has to rely on word of mouth to have their music spread to new ears, having it available on a venue such as Bandcamp or Spotify doesn't actually cost them anything to attract new listeners. They upload it once, the big man upstairs takes his cut, and whatever funds come your way through those sources are yours. And think about how many of these artists go viral and actually become mildly or wildly successful because their music was easy to access. This is in contrast to only promoting music locally, which doesn't necessarily take less money to produce, and is purposefully reaching a smaller audience. Sometimes, bands even go out of their way to make it difficult for non-Japanese people to engage with them, like when record labels purposefully prohibit selling releases overseas through second hand shops even though they aren't footing the shipping bill, or when the label uploads a PV to their official channel and then region-locks it to Japan so that we have to use VPNs to watch a music video on an international platform. Stick some fucking ads before the video and make some free money god damn it. Here's an excerpt from Bandcamp's pricing page where the explain how they run their business. Now I don't suggest this in lieu of signing a record deal, because a deal also comes with other benefits such as free promotion, practice space, and studio time. But for a lot of starting, independent visual kei bands that don't have a lot of funds, this is the more ideal way to go. We don't even know how well this approach would work because no band has ever tried it. I listen to both the underground metal scene as well as the doujin scene from Japan, and both scenes run their affairs completely differently, and both manage to promote their music and ship internationally way more efficiently than visual kei bands. The way the visual kei scene runs its affairs in 2018 is almost identical to the way they did it in 2008. It's been ten years and not much has changed, and the underlying attitudes pervading the scene are even earlier than that. The world is changing, and bands must prepare and adapt. You are entirely correct in that most of us would never buy a release. I am guilty of this too, no doubt. Many record companies realize this, and that's why they are transitioning to streaming services. Japan needs to catch up. I don't even like streaming services, and I still prefer to download and hoard all my music, but I recognize the appeal and utility in what they offer. Complaining about being on the brink of disbandment while spending large amounts of money on make-up, outfits, and photo shoots means concessions have to be made somewhere, and if the way that music is distributed has to change then so be it. Visual kei needs to become more consumer friendly, no matter where that consumer may live. I should make an addendum to my earlier post and clarify that live-distributed releases don't bother me if they function as a preview. If whatever music or DVD or merch sold at a live is eventually included in a store-purchasable fashion, then I'm fine with waiting. I'd have to wait anyway, and at least the luck portion is removed from the equation. Extract your profits up front, and then sell it to the masses later. If pumping out CDs stresses the budget that much, take orders and only sell as many CDs as was ordered so no band ends up with hundreds of unsold releases. Hell, do what Kisaki did and distribute any remaining CDs through auctions online under anonymous accounts at a later date so all the money goes back to the band anyway. But only selling things at lives sucks for everyone who couldn't go, international fan or not, and you don't make as much money as you could have if you just sold it both ways. This is a ... weird approach to take, but I actually like that masaya cared enough about the international fans to make it available to us in some fashion. BLESSCODE tried something different, and it wasn't at the expense of the consumer's time, money, and effort. Maybe they didn't make that much money off of it, but the alternative was to have a bunch of pressed yet unsold CDs sitting around, which would just mean that's wasted money anyway. Sometimes the sentiment behind actions are priceless, and I know many fans of BLESSCODE appreciated this gesture. I sure do, and I'm not even a fan of them! I would really like to understand the logistics behind how this whole scene works from top to bottom, because the more I sit and think about it the more I feel like there's a few people at the top holding back progress for everyone else. A lot of counter arguments I can make to my own points is that some big wig sitting in a cushy office set up a contract expressly forbidding bands from implementing half the ideas I proposed, which makes most of my arguments moot anyway. Record companies may be making record profits these days, but on that same token artists and musicians have more tools and promotion than at any time in history before. The fact that we know about every single upstart indies band in Japan just weeks or even days after they formed is a far cry from how the scene was back in 1999, when only the biggest names in the scene were whispered in noisy American cafeterias with 128kbps sound samples and low res PV snippets available online in two to three places, with a random selection of full tracks available for the pirating on Napster. tl;dr - a band is both a business and an investment. It may sound harsh, but just because a bunch of pretty boys slap on make up doesn't mean that they can get away with running their business inefficiently. Diversify and adapt, or face disbandment.

But...the internet. You don't have to sell CDs to sell music anymore. It's a false equivalence in the age of gigabit internet. In my opinion, blaming overseas fans for poor sales is a straw man argument. Plenty of non-visual indie acts from all over the world produce music on a dime and manage to sell it to anyone interested. In fact, most of these bands do the legwork with constant online promotion in order to get the word out, and promotion via word of mouth is free. We do it all the time on their behalf. We have YouTube, we have iTunes, we have SoundCloud, we have OTOTOY, we have Bandcamp, we have official home pages, and we have countless other services which provide instant international exposure for a minimal price. At what point does it transition from "music is expensive to make" to "fuck you foreigners, you don't get to hear these particular songs"? Because honestly, that's what this whole live-distributed music has transformed into from the perspective of someone who is never going to take a trip to Japan. Also, there's a big, BIG difference between a live distributed release that functions as a preview and a live distributed release that functions as a present. One of them might end up on a future release available for international purchase. The other disappears into the sands of time. Limited live-distributed releases in particular are a form of ass cancer that needs to go terminal and die. That's intentionally spending money and limiting your exposure for no appreciable gain. If you have money for wigs and photo shoots but not enough money to record music, you're doing the whole visual kei band thing wrong.

For as much as I love visual kei, there are plenty of practices I detest. I could go on forever. It wouldn't be fair to celebrate all of the good in the scene without admitting the bad as well. There are so many things that make me sad, make me irate, or make me want to rip my hair out that it was hard to settle on just five. Here's five commonplace practices in visual kei that's a total ball ache for any international fan invested into the scene. Like I said above, I have way more than five things that annoy me about the scene. Does anyone else want to fill in the gaps with practices that they hate that they've come to accept within the scene? Come share your frustrations and horror stories with me. We have plenty of tea and live-distributed crackers for you.

pls no guys. i love drama as much as the next person but there's something special and toxic about dir en grey drama that makes my lactose intolerant stomach churn. i'd rather not swing the hammer 2day.

For better or for worse, visual kei is something that's had an impact on my life. I never thought groups of cross dressing Japanese men playing metal would be something that's stuck with me for so long, but throughout all the surprises, discoveries, disappointments, and developments I've stuck around in some capacity. I may not be as heavy into visual kei or Japanese music as I used to be, but there's a part of me that will always go back to the music I've enjoyed and another part of me that's always looking forward to new bands, activities, and trends. Here are five things I really enjoy about the scene which has kept me coming back again and again since 1999. So those are all the things I like about visual kei. I'm sure I missed some. What do you like about visual kei?

In the future, please be sure to put some of the names of artists for the CDs in the title of the topic. It will be easier to find potential buyers that way! Thank you.

And what would be the artistic output of this "new" project? Nothing, because that's what YOSHIKI produces musically. NOTHING, just like S.K.I.N.. They haven't produced a new album that's a decade in the making, with three deadlines that have come and passed by now. They haven't remastered their old albums to give us anything in the meantime. The album's been 90% done in perpetuity. And somehow he has the nerve to sell $300 tickets to an event where they play nothing new. I have half a mind to lock this topic because this album is never coming out, but I enjoy the salt too much.

Is it reusable? Would be a shame if i couldn't use it forever.

I'm loving all these ideas! Keep them coming! Also just because your idea isn't chosen for this trade-off doesn't mean it won't make a surprise appearance at a later date. There are too many good ideas to not use.