PIZAZ

have to give the album more listens to form a more detailed opinion, but now i'm just shook
you know some days ago i listened to their release of 2016, don't even remember the name, just listened to it twice and deleted it. idk why i decided to give them another chance, but i saved 11 tracks out of 12 which is ridiculous for me, i mean, i often like 2-3 tracks from an album and consider it as a nice result. 
i like doubt the best for now, but i'm sure it's because i've watched pv several times
have to give the album more listens to form a more detailed opinion, but now i'm just shook
you know some days ago i listened to their release of 2016, don't even remember the name, just listened to it twice and deleted it. idk why i decided to give them another chance, but i saved 11 tracks out of 12 which is ridiculous for me, i mean, i often like 2-3 tracks from an album and consider it as a nice result. 
doubt is catchy af and is my fav for now, but im sure i'll enjoy other ones as well later, when i'll become tired of repeating this one~
 

How come are my bois buried on page four?  😕 What did people think about the new album
 
My general impressions are that it's a bit more ferocious than the last one which suits me quite fine, and the singles are great and that's like 50% of this album at least. There's not a whole lot to be said about a band that hasn't really changed on any fundamental way since like two albums ago, so what's left is just to keep track of the shades of different colours that've appeared and disappeared every time they put out something. It's like keeping track of birds... Anyway, only two ballads and the last one is nice, the kind of head banging live tracks that were not singles range from tolerable to quite ok while still being totally left in the shadow of the singles like Toge, DOUBT and the long title that fucking rip. At its best this band is as crazy as it can be when the guitarists break out from their torpor a little and funny vocal effects are piled on layer by layer, although here the ballad at the end is kind of a testament to the fact that this band can do more than just one thing while retaining its own sound. Anyway, decent effort while not as good as the first or the second albums. 

❤️

I posted both because I couldn't choose and they're both great XD

Here's what I can remember about this week:
Joel McHale looks good for a 50 year-old Joel McHale annoying Michelle was great It was weird to see a straight man be a guest judge on the show, going from "oMg yAasss GUuUUurL slEIGh" to "WHOOOO, YEAH," I kinda hoped that appearing on the show would have "gayed" him up a little~ I didn't immediately recognise Tiffany Pollard That dance instructor was a limp-wristed cunt lol I haven't mocked a 'gay voice' so much since 2012 For the second time, Ro'ger should have gone home Nina's college horror story omg (it was Nina, right? There's still too many people to keep track of) It's recently come to my attention that Vanessa Vanjie Mateo has been using chest glitter on every runway look I forgot what the preview showed for next week, nothing to look forward to I guess Can we please bring back double eliminations? Or maybe some idiot at WOW Presents can leak the Snatch Game episode?

Back when I was living with my family, we had a foxhound named Josie. She was absolutely beautiful, and because she had light blonde fur, she'd pretty much glow in the sunlight.

I took that picture from the Dogs Trust website ages ago because all the other pictures I had of her were on my old phone, which I don't have anymore. Good thing I saved it when I did, because I just checked back on their website and her picture's no longer there.
We got her in the summer, and we were all a little awestruck when we first saw her because her summer coat that year had a large white outline of a heart on her back. I don't remember if it was like that every year, but it definitely was that year. She was two when we got her (born April 20th, 2008... I still remember her birthday) and eight when we had to give her away (we got evicted). Never really got to say goodbye to her, but I hear she's with a new, loving family now, so that's a positive.
She was a funny dog; a bit daft, and liked to think she was a human (she would sit like one, try to express her emotions like one, etc). She was good at reading people to an almost scary level; she'd comfort them when they were sad more effectively than any human could, and she could even tell when they were about to be sick. When I was eleven years old, I got ill at school at around 11am and had to be sent home not long after. When my mother came to pick me up, she said Josie had been very anxious at around 11am but she calmed down when I got home.
Ahh, I could go on forever about old Josie, but I won't turn this soliloquy into a book. I've dragged this out long enough.

Big brick head of a dog named Frito, adopted about half a year ago. He's approximately 95% giant noggin. I adore him muchly, he in turn adores food, trying to escape outside, laying on the couch upside down, long walks, and destroying all fluffy toys.
 

i am a ghost

I love your threads, you always make the most interesting threads.
do you live in a palace like Gackt? I think it's really cool.
I also think Mana-sama and Kamijo-sama live in palaces.
maybe they live in castles.

Yesterday when I was brushing my teeth I thought I saw trombe and that's almost the same thing here. 

Yesterday i have take the elevator for back at home  because i live in a palace  and while i was inside the elevator i have heard screams come far  away underground  and  the elevator was become hot  so i have push the stop botton and i am escaped  from the elevator  i couldn't  breathe  my  breathe was gone away  and i have had fatigue  to breathe half day ,   the palace stay becoming  infested  from the Ghosts and certainly  no one will do something but only if something  happen  someone do something, i  will not take the elevator  i go  at home walking on the stairs for my safety is the first time that something like this  is happen to me scary time of my life 💜😘 

HeaRt changing their name to "tRaeH" is pretty bad. I mean, after trying to google info about them recently, I can understand why they did it, but it just looks so unappealing.
I also keep misreading it as "tRasH".

avanchick - jinsei game
briefly speaking, the main character goes through several reincarnations, he reborns as a host, as salaryman, playboy bartender, and bandomen for whom nobody cares (all four careers not respected in society), but no matter who you are life is a joke and god is just playing with us and we buy relationships for money and bla bla bla
 
yami uta by gallo is criticizing japan, as there are two lines about corrupted country of the gods. japan is referred as country of the gods because their myths say emperors ascend from japanese god amaterasu.
 
well half of did song is in english and those lines cover pretty much everything: no point in living, no point in dying, god is dead, all that teen angst stuff

I would bet that many people did. But like I said before, I wasn't very happy when I saw it. I didn't make a big stink of it, but I did not check Chanty out for quite some time simply because of that stunt. The first time I heard anything from Chanty was when someone put it on a mix, and then I swiped the mini and proceeded to never listen to it. I wasn't sad either when one of the members announced departure. I also refuse to review any of their material here. So these kinds of things do bother me and I do the things I can to express my displeasure, but I also realize that outside of here I have no power to change those attitudes.
 
 
But that is the way Japan is! Even if there are other races in Japan, Japan has been and primarily will be Japanese. Japanese customs and culture dominates there and it goes way back, and all that history has an impact on the present. They have exposure to some parts of western culture but a lot of context is lost in translation, and that doesn't displace their culture, and race is one of those things. As a result, their culture puts less value on racial issues than ours does. It's unfortunate, and with time those attitudes can change, but right now that's the way it is. I don't like it, but I have no choice but to accept it. My country is still in the process of sorting its own racial issues out, so I'm willing to extend some patience to them in this aspect.
 

And I think this is the most important thing you said. It means SOMETHING, and that something is definitely unsavory, but that doesn't mean we can generalize about the political and religious beliefs of an entire race of people. The same thing goes for use of nazi imagery in visual kei.  I know that they know what that symbolizes, and that it is insensitive, hateful, and inflammatory. I bet some artists do it for the shock value, some are more radicalized and believe in it, and some aren't associated with it at all. Plenty of songs feature speech snippets from Hitler, Goebbels, and the like, but these clips are used in many contexts. The simple inclusion of these clips doesn't mean they are automatically neo-nazis.

There was a poster in here I had to censor because they wrote several long manifestos, but between the ranting there was some lucid thoughts that do add some context to this discussion. They mentioned lyrics from several visual kei bands that could be interpreted as one or more band members having radical beliefs. Unfortunately, they did not include an English translation, so I can't verify. Can anyone find translations for the following songs so we can decide on our own?

Avanchick - Jinsei Game
 

THE GALLO - Maou -Yami Uta-
 

D.I.D. - nihilism.
 
 

I hated that their major label forced a name change from 『Ein Campen』they debuted with

Found it...I remember this being one of the first things I read when I first went to Shattered Tranquility.

I wish I could find this picture right now, but when Chanty popped up on the scene they did it with blackface. That's what turned me off the band entirely. But did they mean anything with it? Probably not, because they live in a pretty homogeneous country and they don't have the cultural conditioning to understand why it is wrong. I would say they lack that conditioning so much, it wraps around the continuum and becomes something so foreign to them that it's not even shocking. Does that make any sense?
 
 

I agree with some of the points you made, but not with the conclusion. People do edgy shit all the time for attention. That doesn't mean they actually believe what they're doing. Visual kei bands appropriated nazi imagery years ago, but that doesn't mean they are automatically all neo nazis. Most bands have never appropriated this imagery, so by your logic most bands aren't neo nazis! We're going to need Akane-level outbursts on twitter saying they hate gays, jews, and blacks, or lyrics or interviews that say as much, before I would be willing to point to a band member and say "yep, that's a neo nazi right there".

If you wish to educate us some more, exactly who is it that you are thinking of and what proof do you have? Proof is the coin of the realm here on MH.

A lot has been already written about the SS uniform being an 'edgy fashion thing' that was copied over and over again by generations of vk bands from the 80s until today. Personally I think it's cringy and stupid but I can't really feel offended after seeing it done so many times.
In fact it's also pretty exotic and in a way understandable that the Japanese wouldn't feel as sensitive to it as Europeans and would generally be less educated about it than them.
What I find much more problematic is the way a lot of bands are using the  imagery of Japanese imperialism. (WWII Uniforms, rising sun flags, propaganda) After all, Japan has its own fascist history of imperialism and war crimes, mainly in other Asian countries. And in contrast to Germany they don't really admit them and don't make mention of it in their history books. It's not really controversial to use these images, despite the crimes they stand for. Using symbols from foreign history as some exotic gimmick is one thing (albeit not great), but using the same propaganda your ancestors used a while back without any proper reflection and not expecting backlash either just shows that young Japanese people are very oblivious and ignorant due to their lack of a proper political education.

There's no nyappy in the world til the jews are eradicated 

i loved that an cafe song where they sang about sending all the gypsies to concentration camps

You dont seem to have the slighest idea of what Nazism was, is and will be. You really should read something!!!
 
First, deniying the Holocaust is EXACTLY what neo nazis do. And Visual Kei Artists, do so, as posted by the japanese guy that lives in germany.
 
Second, IMPERIAL JAPAN WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT ALLY OF GERMANY AND THE WHOLE AXIS IN WW II BESIDES ITALY !!!!
How do you not know this???!!
THE ALLIES threw 2 NUCLEAR BOMBS to japanese cities full of people. 
Third: Swastika is originally indo-aryan (vedic) symbol, before it became buddhist, iranic (scythian) and Pagan (european) symbol.
 
Visual Kei artists are secretly neo-nazis, and they are angry at ex-communist and ex-allies countries.
 
Is this good or bad? well, depends of who you ask. Same goes for capitalists/communists.

Instead of capturing DAMY at their most mature, I feel that Jigokuchuu Shinteki Limiter captured them at their most conflicted. They attributed their separation to musical differences and I feel like this release captures that struggle well.  As mentioned above, most of Jigokuchuu feels half baked. Like they didn't try as much as they should have which could very well have been due to musical differences in terms of where the band wanted their sound to go so instead they settled on whatever was presentable, but not fantastic (which I understand can be difficult when there's conflicting opinions on what fantastic should sound like). 
 
My best guess is that some of the members wanted to keep the early-dezert sound through their career while others wanted to go the exact same way as dezert  and take a more pop rock-sounding direction. DAMY's sound had showed that conflict for some time now.  That's just my theory though and it could  very well not have been what was happening at all. Either way, it sucks that their last release will freeze time for them as a representation of this musical conflict and couldn't be as memorable as some of their earlier work.  I still like Jigokuchuu as a piece of music, but not for the reasons I liked DAMY. 
 
Also if I remember correctly wasn't their drummer Miharu and actual roadie for Dezert?
 
 

| It's hard to talk about an album that does nothing new but manages to be interesting anyway
 
I've heard whispers about the potential of DAMY from many corners of Monochrome Heaven, but I have an unofficial rule about listening to visual kei bands in their infancy. I don't like getting attached to promising bands only to watch them fizzle out, and bands that do that are a dime a dozen in visual kei, so I'm about six months to a year behind on what's new by design. I always had intentions to check them out, but nothing motivated me like their disbandment announcement. It's now or never, and 自己中心的リミッター (Jigokuchuu Shinteki Limiter) should capture DAMY at their most mature, and I figured it would be a logical place to start.

If you are anything like me, you know DAMY best by their aesthetic. It's dark and gruesome, with erratically applied makeup and synchronized outfits that drive the theme home. They sound exactly like they look; close your eyes and imagine generic metalcore riffs with a pinch of inspiration, and you're pretty close. DAMY has all the trappings of the turn of the century metalcore visual kei sound that I've come to both love and hate. The vocalist is a bit weak and nasal with a high pitched singing voice, but he has a quality and charisma to his delivery so I can overlook that most of the time. His harsh vocals can be quite savage sometimes too. The riffs are usually where I give visual kei bands a lot of grief, and to be honest I was expecting 自己中心的リミッター to be a monotonous affair, but DAMY spice it up and keep it interesting the whole time. Musical themes range from pure aggression to madness play, and even a few more lucid moments where the pop chorus hooks worm their way in, but I was disappointed to find that they didn't go outside of the box too much.

What I'm saying is that 自己中心的リミッター sounds equally generic and distinctly visual kei, a love letter to a time in visual kei long past. While you have definitely heard flavors of this style before, you haven't heard it combined in this way, and that's the strongest case I have for giving this album a shot. For example, the guitars in lead single "ままごと" (Mamagoto) are transported right out of the 90s, and is something I'd expect to hear on a La:Sadie's demo tape. On the other hand, album opener "心髄" (shinzui) rips 2:57~3:03 straight from MUCC's "蘭鋳" (Ranchuu) 2:20~2:23, and it only took me one listen to catch that bit of worship and know exactly what DAMY was all about. That is what makes DAMY the best 6/10 band one could hope for.

A part of me thinks that 自己中心的リミッター may mark the beginning of the end for a strain of visual kei that's stuck around for over a decade. It may not have the lasting impact on the scene the way Dir en grey's GAUZE did, which is widely regarded as the apex of the 90's sound, but for once I have no idea what band will step up to fill the void. I've always seen DAMY as playing second fiddle to DEZERT, who before they changed up their sound, were ultimately were playing homage to bands like MUCC, Dio-distraught overlord-, and UnsraW in their own right! Even まみれた (Mamireta) have moved on after exploring this sound for a few releases. キズ (Kizu) might step up, but the crown is open for the taking, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of bands wanting to take it.

Could that be because the scene has been saturated with this style for too long? Is it a feeling that "everything that can be done has been done", and that there's nothing new in this style anyone can offer? Or is it something else? I'm interested in knowing your thoughts and what you think the implications of DAMY's disbandment has on the rest of the scene.
 

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