Zeus

The fac that we find it bad/boring/whatever is clearly subjective, it's just a matter of tastes
 
Just that for me they could be much more good than that, when DOOM was released, people were like "omg this is good, good to see Rame back with Eros, this will be a good band etc etc",
 
It happened that way cause it was the first single, this was brand new, new sounds, new Rame and Eros band, new singing style for Eros and stuff like that, now it's their 4th single ? and it's exactly the same as Namida Khz, and Namida Khz was kinda the same as DOOM, they just do the same thing over and over
 
I like that electro sound they have, but I'm clearly waiting for something different now -> heavier songs, with some electro in it as it's their touch, and some changes in Ice's voice, cause he really always sing with the same voice intonation in every song + they should remove autotune/vocoder, his voice is good, there's no need to add that
 
Again, it's subjective. I have high expectations for this band, I'm sure they could grow bigger and bigger, they just need to make some changes
 
PS: You can't compare Black Gene to XodiacK, they are clearly not the same band.

I'm not complaining about them doing electro-what-ever. I'm complaining about them not doing it well. They can do whatever they want as long as they do it well.

Hizumi sent out an announcement to all of his fans on his UMBRELLA Mailing list. The translation can be found here. I will copy the source here in case it gets lost/removed in the future.
 
If you're wondering the significance behind it, that means he's fully healed!

Hizumi sent out an announcement to all of his fans on his UMBRELLA Mailing list. The translation can be found here. I will copy the source here in case it gets lost/removed in the future.
 
If you're wondering the significance behind it, that means he's fully healed!

Hizumi sent out an announcement to all of his fans on his UMBRELLA Mailing list. The translation can be found here. I will copy the source here in case it gets lost/removed in the future.
 
If you're wondering the significance behind it, that means he's fully healed!

Hizumi sent out an announcement to all of his fans on his UMBRELLA Mailing list. The translation can be found here. I will copy the source here in case it gets lost/removed in the future.
 
If you're wondering the significance behind it, that means he's fully healed!

Interesting, thanks for the excerpt.
 
edit: 15sec THE UNRAVELING teaser is uppp
 

I go through phases. I've never cut myself completely off from a certain genre or scene, but there are times when I listen to a certain style of music more or less than others. I'm like the weather - constantly changing.

I don't see any reasons for them not to release an album each year.
They aren't mad famous so no nation-wide touring, their VK years are pretty much over, so there's no need to release 20 + singles in 3 types between each album, and  a 10 track album once in 12 months is not much since 3-4 of those already come from singles.
Gzeatte technically roll out more songs per year than any other band, yet I don't see anyone calling them out.

It's funny that people don't vote and then complain about their favourite bands not winning.
 
 
I can only repeat what I said last time:
 
The margins in this poll are extremely small. That happens when a small number of people vote on a large number of bands. In the majority of cases it's only one vote that lies between winner and second place. In some cases, two votes overall were enough to make it into the ranks. So don't say "I don't vote because my vote doesn't change anything" - it does a lot in this poll.
 
 
That being said, there is another thing I wanted to discuss:
 
Participation in the voting has decreased from year to year. And it's not like there aren't enough people around. Which makes me think that the majority of people aren't particulary interested in this voting anymore. I'd surely be interested in running it again next year, but I wonder if it's worth the work. Plus, if it has even less participants, it will be hard to get any solid results at all. 
 
So I'd to ask:
 
Is there anything we should change about the voting?
Should we make it shorter or change some categories?
Should the staff maybe pre-pick some artist for each category and then let you vote on it instead of having free categories?
Should we raffle out some price to a random voter to encourage participation?
 
Any other ideas to make more people interested in this again? Or should we just scrap the whole voting alltogether?

Japanese jazz titans EGO-WRAPPIN' have announced that their 8th album 初回ラッピン will be released on 2013.04.10. It will feature 11 tracks.
It comes in two editions: a regular CD Edition for ¥3,000 and a CD + DVD version for ¥10,500 and a slice of your soul. The CD + DVD version comes with:
Source: http://www.egowrappin.com/newalbum/

This goes as well for me. My mother was all about the classic rock. You could say that I grew up on Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, LLed Zeppelin, Metallica, Megadeth, Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix. My father was on the other side of the spectrum and he focused a lot on funk and Motown. So on his side, I got introduced to Michael Jackson, Kool & The Gang, etc. My grandmother was also different and loves soul and R&B, so things like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, etc. were commonly playing when I was in her house.
However, both mom and pops listened to a few artists in common that all leaned toward the rock side of the spectrum. So things like Metallica's Black Album and Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti were common in my upbringing. I can't count how many times I've heard Kashmir, haha. This is probably why I favor rock and metal so much.
A big problem with finding my own identity was two-fold: one, most of their music was on cassettes. Two, neither one of them listened to anything from the current music scene that I liked. My mom tried to remain relevant, listening to things like Epica, Pray for the Soul of Betty, and Evanescence but I didn't particularly like any of these bands. My dad and grandmother just hated all new music and won't follow anything at all, so they were no help either. When I tried turning on the radio or the TV, I was pretty much restricted to all things Disney-related because everyone was deathly afraid of my impressionable seven-year-old mind being warped by the "gangsta rap" trend that was booming in NYC. It didn't really help though because due to the neighborhood we lived in, it was omnipresent. I didn't have to watch TV to recognize the newest Biggie song, or to feel somewhat sad when 2pac got shot on my birthday (check it, he did!). So you can actually say that I listened to almost everything!
So one day when I was seven, I went into the cafeteria for breakfast and ran into one of my friend's older sisters. She was currently on her "all Japanese music is superior!!!11!1one" kick and shoved Dir en grey into my ears. It was love at first listen!
...
HAHA OK forget that bullshit. I laughed my ass off and asked who those faggy looking Japanese dudes were. She wasn't very happy at my remark but what I heard was so different than anything I'd ever seen before. When I finally got a computer to search for them, I found a few tracks from their Gauze album. That's when  my exposure to VK began.
As I say often, finding VK music back in the 90's was hard. Yeah, you could run into the big bands like Malice Mizer and Dir en grey if you searched for a little bit. But my Internet-fu wasn't very good and I couldn't find much more. My short stint with VK ran into an abrupt end when my old Micron computer pooped from having too many viruses (wasn't Windows 95 SO FUN?) so I was out of the loop for about six years. In that time, I tried to get into rap and failed miserably. Attempting to discover more rock music got me ridiculed from people who would insist that anything that wasn't made by black people "wasn't black music". Combine that with pressure to fit in, Nickelback, Napster shutting down, and an inability to find more classic rock bands (didn't realize the whole "trend" was over) or any localized tunes I heard out of anime shows and I ended up cutting myself off from music entirely until high school.
In high school, I met up with a few people that loved Japanese music. Don't quite remember how that happened; I just know that one day we got to talking about it. Then I was introduced to VK again. That's when I went crazy. I had six years worth of music to catch up on, and the people I were around were indie-heads. So for about two to three years all I listened to was VK and I was proud of it. I borrowed CD's, was introduced to Limewire (which was pretty much Napster 2.0 at the time) and googled around about basically visual kei. Found a lot of bands that way, but nowhere near as many as I found here. I think I found Batsu once, clicked on two topics and saw how badly organized the site was and ran away. I didn't come across TW until late 2007 and early 2008. Signed up and was initially a lurker. What ended up making me a permanent part of the whole website was some dickweed named Brandon. It was around the time Jasmine You died and he said something along the lines of "well he died of nigger flu".
Needless to say I verbally shoved a foot up his ass. The people of TW supported me. I kinda felt bad because I made Ito delete six pages full of drama (sorry about that <.<;;;  ) but after that happened I was all "FUCK YEAH TW" and I became a permanent fixture here.
And then THE CAT5 came along one day and was like "hey, you seem like a pretty open-minded fellow. Let's trade music!". And then the era of musical expansion began. He sent me tons of bands I'd never heard of before that were all Japanese. I had a HOLY FUCK moment. I always knew there was stuff outside of the visual kei scene but it wasn't like TW was a good place to find it. I devoured his mixtapes and then was hungry for more. The explosion was further fueled by Wind's uploads, who was responsible for introducing me to Touhou. I'll never understand to this day how I scrobbled 412 plays of Electric Red in one week.
And then I thought to myself: "Is there more music like this abroad?". That's really when I began exploring every single genre from every country I could think of.
And then about four years later (it's been four years already v____v) you have the eclectic mess that is Zess.

i heard my first favorite pop music when i was a first grade, 1997 when we danced during our field demonstration in a soccer field and when i rode the school bus jeepney. my dad likes old rock music and my mom likes what she hears from tv or from her friends. when the first time watching anime on cable tv with opening and ending themes, i recorded some of rave master, gto, rurouni kenshin and other anime theme songs from animax and axn. in 2005, i explored more on contemporary music by listening and watching to western music and original pinoy music (opm) before i focused myself listening to more japanese music from anime in 2007 onwards deleting some of my recorded 20 second samples of mp3 and music video of contemporary music, anime theme songs, japanese music and opm in LG KU250 mobile phone. i received a newer phone in 2011 a Nokia C3-00, adding more western, japanese and opm music with voice samples of voice actors from internet, celebrities and politicians that i heard on radio and some 70 MB+ java games. i changed my taste in western music retaining only one pop group Backstreet Boys, one nu-metal changed to alternative-electronic rock band LINKIN PARK focusing more on 80's rock and heavy metal. in terms of opm i retain only two bands Eraserheads and Urbandub with the most percentage of it is japanese rock, heavy metal and pop due to my mobile phone only having 8 GIG memory external storage.

Lol. . . my past is starting to look really sad. . .
 
I didn't care much for music up until I entered high school. Before, the only artists I really loved were Coldplay, Eminem, and various country, hip-hop, and contemporary Christian songs (pretty much the staple diet of the average Southern teenager with access to a radio). Both my parents were casually into your standard 70's and 80's pop and rock music (Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, etc.) so I think that's where my interest in that kind of music came from, but for the most part my father doesn't care all that much about music anymore and my mother only listens to Christian pop. 
 
When I discovered the internet and started playing video games and watching anime, I started liking the theme songs and that's what lead me to J-Rock. For a couple years I just listened to whatever band had the prettiest members or whatever was the most catchy and melodic artist, like Gackt and other visual kei. I'm pretty sure it was Luna Sea and Number Girl that officially altered my perspective on music forever. They really opened up my mind to other types of rock music and made me more appreciative of it. Now I listen to shit I never imagined I would be listening to. It's funny because my interest in Japanese rock has now caused me to become re-interested in English speaking music and not the other way around, haha. 

pretty cool topic actually, very interesting read!
 
so here is me:
i pretty much started off (and stayed for a veryvery long time) with my dads vinyl-collection which was mostly mid 60's to early 70 blue/rock (Hendrix, Cream, ledZep, RollingStones, Yardbirds) aswell as some Jazz, bigband, soul and ragtime stuff (Ramsey Lewis, Jimmy Smith, Chris Barber, Otis Redding etc..)
 
only in very late high-school times, when indie rock was the big thing i adapted that aswell, because it was basically the same (white stripes, mando diao, qotsa...)
after that (now college, studying classical music) i pretty much went with the flow as indie became more electronic and dance-oriented bands like that went to my book too (justice, boys noize, the presets, digitalism, doesitoffendyouyeah)
while at the same time trying to find some heavier stuff like monster magnet and danko jones, while still trying to avoid the actual "metal" corner, which had this very cheesy and pretty stupid image (especially in the classical world) but probably being secretly pretty fascinated by that stuff.
 
as a kind of metal starting point i guess i have to embarrasingly mention apocalyptica, which where kind of accepted to listen to (cellos'n shit)
then something pretty important happend (i was about 20/21 i guess), a german eekly newspaper published an article about highschool bands and how they helped sort of "troubled" poor/immigrant youth to get past race-issues and whatnot and giving sense and direction and blabla, inspirational stuff i guess, but there was one small band (on the cover actually) that already looked kinda cool
http://www.bandnet.de/files/fotos/2919/banner%5B1%5D.jpg
and i looked them up online and also pretty much liked the stuff they did aswell (sort of numetal, gothic-hardrock probably)
which led to the realisation that i pretty much envied them, some northern schoolkids can actually do cool stuff, while i'm stuck studying crappy classical saxophone, that can't be right.
in the article it said they were listening to d'espairsray, DirEnGrey and Girugämesh...
 
the next day i decided to quit saxophone (actually i still finished it, since i was already 7th semester, so that would've been quite a waste), bought a guitar and started writing music i actually like (and registered at tainted-world at the time)
starting with the more popular stuff deg, despa, giru, mucc and gazette (alongside of finally listening to pantera, slayer etc) i later switched to a bit more underground stuff (thanks to zess, jigsaw and cat i guess, also that comes with studying audio-engineering pretty much) with one major discovery that was boris, which is one reason why i'm probably for the main part in the post-/stoner-/doom-metal/grunge and heavy rock area nowadays.
 
that beeing said over the past one or two years i've pretty much opend up towards every musical genre there is, may it be ambient drone, noisecore, glitch, or on the other side of things kpop, singer-songwriter, touhou and similarly vntrve and cheesy stuff and everything inbetween, i try to find good things in every piece of music that i encounter, may it either be something interesting and new (or a fresh combination of things), or something well known, but very well executed. there's nearly always something worth appreciating to find.
 
 
long post is long

I really don't know if there's a topic similar to this, but if there is, whatever.
Is there a time in your life that changed your view on music that made you want to explore more or that really took a turn on your music taste? (sounds to broad of a question, but meh). If not, then tell me what music you grew up with.
For me there was a time when music really hit me on how amazing sounds could be. I was a kid and I liked many radio songs and basically anything with a catchy tune, though I loved the Tony Hawk game soundtrack, but who didn't as a kid.
One day I stayed up late watching basic television. This show JBTV -an alternative music video show- showed up in which I took an interest of by its funny music videos. I stayed up at night the next day to watch it and it showed the song "Walking Shade" by Billy Corgan. I was like "damn this song is just to amazing"!! I just couldn't fathom why this song sounded so good.
Then every night I stayed up to see what JBTV had in store. I slowly started to dislike the radio, thinking that if it doesn't sound as good as Billy Corgain, it can go rot in the ground. as they did
Right now music is a big part of me, next with drawing and video games (:

Right, my Father was playing Black Sabbath, Hendrix, Madonna and C-Pop
when i was growing up. And I watched lots of (now vintage) anime and tokusatsu shows too.
By my Youth I started to get into Urban, Britpop and Industrial Metal.
Circles of friends helped to developed this one.
So basically my music taste formed like that. 
Are liquid and ever changing, since I basically pretty open minded to new sounds.

I grew up in a house with proto-metal parents, by proto-metal I mean all that early classic rock that influenced modern day metal bands. So Deep Purple, Sabbath and etc. Some stoner rock too.
 
So I was pretty grounded in rock based music at that point. Even though I was too young for the grunge explosion in Seattle, that also solidified by taste in rock music since that was the cool thing the older kids are into. 
 
Got into punk because I wanted something more aggressive and badass, metal later because I wanted something EVEN MORE aggressive and badass. I was introduced to VK but I hated it at first. Typical VK fans who don't know what genres are showed me a poppy Malice Mizer song and told me that was Japanese metal and I laughed in their face. It was basically Gackt prancing around like a pussy and being the elitist metal/punk kid I was I couldn't take it seriously. Then eventually I saw the Bara no Seidou concert and thought it was the coolest thing ever. Did some internet digging, soul seek and that bullshit and found Aliene Ma'riage and Derp in herp and HERE I AM.

At a very young age I already loved music and everything that came with it. Four year old me would often dance and sing in the living room to random songs on the radio whenever I wasn't at school. My mother tried to keep me away from it though, since my dad used to be in a band and was often gone from home because he and the band often played in small venues throughout the region. So I stopped being interested in music when I was around 7 years old.
 
When I turned 12 I got an mp3-player and I listened to most songs from the radio, some Dutch hip-hop and other things. When I was 13 I discovered YouTube and found an AMV with a Nightwish song. Even though I had never before been introduced to rock music nor symphonic metal, this instantly clicked with me. My mp3-player soon became a mix of techno, electro-pop and symphonic metal. The techno and electro-pop disappeared after a while and more symphonic metal and hard-rock took their places. Bands like Nightwish, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, After Forever and Evanescence was what I listened to the most back then.
 
Visual kei followed. A friend discovered An Cafe and became a big fan and tried to get me into them too. Before that I had already found out about NIGHTMARE, UVERworld, HIGH & MIGHTY COLOR and Gackt by myself (because I watched a little bit of anime at the time). I thought An Cafe were okay, but never fully got into them. I really got into abingdon boys school after that, and stayed closer to more darker bands (mid-2010, the time I discovered D) but after a while it turned into a mix of more serious pop-rock acts and some darker bands. Currently the amount of VK bands I listen to has sincerely decreased (pretty much limited to D, BUCK-TICK, Alice Nine and Kagrra,), but I'm currently still exploring the non-VK scene, so you can say my journey isn't quite over yet!

Be careful here. Hindsight is 20/20. it's easy to say that the visual music from the 90's is better than today's music because only the best of the best have survived over time. I can guarantee you that there are just as many crappy visual kei bands now as there were then - there was just no outlet to hear about them. Many of these crappy bands have been lost to time, and some of the good ones too. It only seems different because the Internet allows us to find out about virtually any band that forms within the last few months. We are now barraged with more information than ever before. It's not the scene that's changed, but just your perception of it.
And for the record, the whole "90's VK scene" was fraught with as many faux-goth bands then as the scene today is filled with metalcore bands that like electronic effects. It's a challenge to find good artists doing something different no matter what genre you listen to, no matter what time it comes from.

Be careful here. Hindsight is 20/20. it's easy to say that the visual music from the 90's is better than today's music because only the best of the best have survived over time. I can guarantee you that there are just as many crappy visual kei bands now as there were then - there was just no outlet to hear about them. Many of these crappy bands have been lost to time, and some of the good ones too. It only seems different because the Internet allows us to find out about virtually any band that forms within the last few months. We are now barraged with more information than ever before. It's not the scene that's changed, but just your perception of it.
And for the record, the whole "90's VK scene" was fraught with as many faux-goth bands then as the scene today is filled with metalcore bands that like electronic effects. It's a challenge to find good artists doing something different no matter what genre you listen to, no matter what time it comes from.

VK IS NOT DEAD. TOPIC CLOSED

From Kanagawa, Japan, the technical progressive math/metalcore band ARISE IN STABILITY have announced that they will begin a one year hiatus from live performance while bass player, Hiroshi Mizuno, spends time in Canada.

While ARISE IN STABILITY plan to temporarily discontinue their live performance schedule in the absence of bass player, Hiroshi Mizuno, the group has made it abundantly clear that they will continue to prepare for the future, writing new songs for what will eventually become the next full-length ARISE IN STABILITY album.

Source: http://rrmetalmag.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1068%3Aarise-in-stability-announce-one-year-hiatus&catid=1%3Afeatured&Itemid=46#.UR07AWdZNw6

Score: | Like a picaresque forty year old on the back of a Harley

NoGoD has never been a particularly amazing band. They burst onto the scene in 2006 and created quite a name for themselves, but this wasn't due to their amazing technical skill, willingness to push boundaries or having the ability or desire to redefine visual kei. They started out as many bands today still do: releasing your standard pop-rock and acoustic tracks packaged with a vague theme about supplanting organized religion with their own and wacky, sometimes tasteless outfits. What really set them apart and got them signed to KING RECORDS was ambition.  
I haven't seen that side of this band in quite some time. After truncating their name and moving to a major label, NoGoD seemed to have lost their way. After dropping two underwhelming albums that indicated a lack of inspiration, it's reasonable to expect V to resemble his cookie-cutter predecessors. Good news: V doesn't sound like it was designed to fill a quota and the enthusiasm they once displayed is back. Somewhat.

V plays much like an adult going through a midlife crisis. This is the most aggressive I've heard them get since their first album, but the band's claws are dull from years of playing it safe. Recollections of their pure acoustic tracks from their indie days poke through on 夢の泡, their progressive leanings birthed on Ring-a Ring-o and honed on II-懐柔 are on show for IV-他者　Philosophia, and their rock anthem side still reminds you it's there with STAND UP!, but there's an air of insincerity about it all. V sounds like new NoGoD trying to cover old NoGoD rather than just NoGoD being themselves. The difference is slight, almost imperceptible, but it's there.

This would be a small complaint in the context of the entire album, if the entire album didn't sound so similar. I wouldn't blame you if you were hit with a sense of déjà vu. The formula is pretty transparent - take a song skeleton, a six-pack of Red Bull and a copy of 罰 and throw it into a studio with the band with the instructions "make more songs like this". All of the goofy gang vocals, distorted guitar and triggered bass pedals can't hide the fact that NoGoD is still strapped for ideas. Your attention may also be drawn to the surprising lack of ballads on this album, but I just attributed that to them having put them all on 欠片. You should too. The last thing V needed is diversity for the sake of being diverse.

The thing they need most is a fresh spring of inspiration and creativity. Raw energy only gets you so far.

Score: | Like a picaresque forty year old on the back of a Harley

NoGoD has never been a particularly amazing band. They burst onto the scene in 2006 and created quite a name for themselves, but this wasn't due to their amazing technical skill, willingness to push boundaries or having the ability or desire to redefine visual kei. They started out as many bands today still do: releasing your standard pop-rock and acoustic tracks packaged with a vague theme about supplanting organized religion with their own and wacky, sometimes tasteless outfits. What really set them apart and got them signed to KING RECORDS was ambition.  
I haven't seen that side of this band in quite some time. After truncating their name and moving to a major label, NoGoD seemed to have lost their way. After dropping two underwhelming albums that indicated a lack of inspiration, it's reasonable to expect V to resemble his cookie-cutter predecessors. Good news: V doesn't sound like it was designed to fill a quota and the enthusiasm they once displayed is back. Somewhat.

V plays much like an adult going through a midlife crisis. This is the most aggressive I've heard them get since their first album, but the band's claws are dull from years of playing it safe. Recollections of their pure acoustic tracks from their indie days poke through on 夢の泡, their progressive leanings birthed on Ring-a Ring-o and honed on II-懐柔 are on show for IV-他者　Philosophia, and their rock anthem side still reminds you it's there with STAND UP!, but there's an air of insincerity about it all. V sounds like new NoGoD trying to cover old NoGoD rather than just NoGoD being themselves. The difference is slight, almost imperceptible, but it's there.

This would be a small complaint in the context of the entire album, if the entire album didn't sound so similar. I wouldn't blame you if you were hit with a sense of déjà vu. The formula is pretty transparent - take a song skeleton, a six-pack of Red Bull and a copy of 罰 and throw it into a studio with the band with the instructions "make more songs like this". All of the goofy gang vocals, distorted guitar and triggered bass pedals can't hide the fact that NoGoD is still strapped for ideas. Your attention may also be drawn to the surprising lack of ballads on this album, but I just attributed that to them having put them all on 欠片. You should too. The last thing V needed is diversity for the sake of being diverse.

The thing they need most is a fresh spring of inspiration and creativity. Raw energy only gets you so far.