I was surprised to see that there was no topic on Buck-Tick so far, seeing as they're one of the pioneers of Visual Kei and have been going strong for over 30 years now.
Who else listens to B-T? What do you think of them?
櫻井 敦司 [SAKURAI ATSUSHI]
On Vocal
DATE OF BIRTH：7th March 1966
BLOOD TYPE：O
BIRTHPLACE：FUJIOKA CITY, GUNMA
HEIGHT / WEIGHT：177cm / 65kg
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN：PISCES
今井 寿 [IMAI HISASHI]
On GUITAR
DATE OF BIRTH：21st October 1965
BLOOD TYPE：O
BIRTHPLACE：FUJIOKA CITY, GUNMA
HEIGHT / WEIGHT：175cm / 58kg
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN：LIBRA
星野 英彦 [HOSHINO HIDEHIKO]
On GUITAR
DATE OF BIRTH：16th June 1966
BLOOD TYPE：A
BIRTHPLACE：FUJIOKA CITY, GUNMA
HEIGHT / WEIGHT：179cm / 66kg
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN：GEMINI
樋󠄀口 豊 [HIGUCHI YUTAKA]
On BASS
DATE OF BIRTH：24th January 1967
BLOOD TYPE：A
BIRTHPLACE：TAKASAKI CITY, GUNMA
HEIGHT / WEIGHT：162cm / 50kg
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN：AQUARIUS
ヤガミ・トール [YAGAMI TOLL]
On DRUMS
DATE OF BIRTH：19th August 1962
BLOOD TYPE：A
BIRTHPLACE：TAKASAKI CITY, GUNMA
HEIGHT / WEIGHT：170cm / 55kg
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN：LEO
My only regret is that I wasn't able to find them sooner, I missed out on so many years of listening just cause of my own incompetence in searching in the past.
Despite this I feel like I've already been listening to them for years, I think Atsushi's voice has a very nostalgic tone to it, I'm not really good at explaining.
They're my favorite band as a flip side to my fav metal band.
I'm really moved by the friendship and connection between all the members, even most marriages don't work that long or smoothly. Even more so when I read Imai was looking into a medium that they were all destined to meet from a past life haha.
I guess aside from loving Atsushi's lyrics, style and what he's overcome /B-T experimentation, I really just envy to have such friends. The same with the twin flame like situation Atsushi had with Issay.
Think I could write too much about what they mean to me now so I'll cut it, but-
I was torn a bit between Six/Nine, but I'm sure now that Darker than Darkness is my favorite album, from cover art to end track. (I had even wrote an exact lyric from DtD on an art piece a few months before hearing it, it felt surreal by chance lol.)
Such a great band with so many bops. I think I became super into them when ROMANCE released, which is still one of my favourite songs to this day. Atsushi is also probably one of the most attractive men alive.
That's also one of the things about them that I really adore. I know it sounds childish, but for me the image of a "band" is one of a bunch of good friends making music and having fun together. So, I think it's really off-putting if other musicians admit to not getting along with their band members (like for example Takanori Nishikawa in the interview with them from 2014 said: B-T are basically the only ones who still do everything together). Them "finding" each other was truly a blessing.
And I mean, managing to stick with the same guys for over 30 years also confirms that their personalities can't be that bad. 😊
I agree 100%, lol.
Personally, I like their earlier work the most: Seventh Heaven, Aku no Hana and Kurutta Taiyou are absolutely perfect. My favourite songs are probably Angelic Conversation and Dress.
One thing that amazes me about this band is how despite being in the scene for 30 years, they still release better/more interesting music then 99% of other Japanese rock bands. There's only a handful of bands in the world who have kept up a streak that long without turning crap. Their last two albums have been really great imo.
I'd really just like to find more VK bands in this vein. Their melodic side really does feel like mid-era Diru to me, but it melds really well with the style they're doing overall. Doesn't make me feel like I should just "go listen to another djent band" because the music is actually different and appeals to different things that I like.
Furthermore, I just like that they're stylistically committed. I know when I put this on I'm getting a heavy album, not an album with 6 metalcore tracks and 6 tracks of wonky circus VK.
Long-time visual-kei veterans Penicillin announced on Facebook today that they will be releasing a new mini-album on November 7th, 2018, entitled メガロマニアの翼 (MEGALOMANIA no Tsubasa).
This is the third mini-album they have released in a row, so I suppose this format is working well for them.
The release will come in two types: a limited edition version that includes a photo booklet (2,800 yen), and a regular edition (2,500 yen) that is just a CD. Both types will have the same track-list (7 songs), but further details are to be announced.
This album is being distributed by b-mode / blowgrow, which is a sub-label of Avex Entertainment. If it's like their last 2 minis, it may also be produced under That Records, which I think Hakuei or Chisato owns.
All I can think listening to it is that it's a really fantastic first album - leaps and bounds above many of their peers, and I think if they stick around in the scene, their next one will be ridiculous. One of the few bands that I feel I absolutely HAVE to see in Japan next year. Actually, with this style of music, I think they'd be really successful in front of a western audience, too, though I know getting VK bands to the states is wishful thinking in most cases.
Didn't know which category these would fit the best, but hope this is okay!
Have been slowly working on these since the late summer
Inspiration mostly from 薄紅ノ葬 but combining elements from various looks, live & printed.
Makeup, hair, costume by me
Photos by Riotcolor
Honestly, as someone who lived through their "try hard to be metal"-era, but also old enough to remember what came before, I'm thrilled with every new look they give us these days. So glad they decided to get visually relevant again.
コドモドラゴン (CODOMO DRAGON) will be releasing a their 6th single since WOLFMAN, "想葬" (Sousou), on November 7th. As per the exhausting BP routine, the single will be released in four types, submit all obi strips to get a tour pamphlet, they'll do a one month tour for the single (from November 10th to December 16th), and play a tour final on January 9th, 2019. Maybe at that show, they'll announce an album...
The visual-kei scene is full of its own quirks and oddities that make it stand out from any other subculture in the music world; these hallmarks also appear to resonate at a national level, in spite of the culture stemming from several metropolitan hubs, each with their own small variants. One of these traits, for better or for worse, is how willing the scene is to reference itself. Since 2013, “willing” has become the incorrect word. “Obsessed,” “addicted,” “driven,” “obligated”; these words seem to fit the bill closer. References to older material is not uncommon in any medium of art, but visual-kei takes it four steps further to emulation. Today is the day we talk about homage-系 (Kei), kids.
“Homage-kei” is a made up word. It isn’t a real category to anyone else other than people who use this board, to be honest, but it is an apt descriptor for this phenomenon. This is when a band reuses melodies, thematic, aesthetics, and even titles from an older, typically more successful, band or bands. However: their music also contains many original elements, which sets them apart from being a literal cover band. It also needs to be more than a single occurrence as well: Dir en grey “””borrowing””” the main riff of Luna Sea’s “G” is not enough, but borrowing the front-man of 黒夢 (Kuroyume)’s aesthetic for several music videos is.
There are several bands that would fall under this umbrella from the late 2000’s. Two I want to touch on are Ru:Natic and the infamous Vajra. The first was one of the earliest examples I can think of that tried to revive the aggressive and bloody punk-meets-goth-meets-pop style popularized in the mid-90’s. They wore black clothes, had neon hair, and sang about being a crazy person invited to dinner parties that they had no business attending. While they weren’t the only group doing this (re: Sadie’s Mary and Sadie’sla), they were the first to start reusing melodies from older bands, namely La:Sadie’s, Madeth Gray’ll, and Aliene Ma’riage. There was even a hard-to-come-by single that was a reinterpretation of Baiser’s “undersea” and they had a demo tape that contained covers from some of the bands previously mentioned. They even lost a bunch of members, changed record labels, and released a lot of rare material: all cornerstones of “what an old school band does.” In my memory of the scene, this was the first time we got a real taste of bands reinventing the 90s sound that many people liked, but had fallen out of favor.
Vajra was fun for the wrong reasons. Their costumes were kind of similar to UnsraW and thematically they were a bit too close to Dir en grey for the fan base at the time’s comfort. One of their singles was apparently a near 1:1 facsimile of another Dir en grey track and that caused a shitstorm on last.fm . For days people were arguing back and forth about whether it was a copy or not. Our own dear @Zeus requested someone overlay it with the original so we could see how similar it was. I personally did not have a horse in that race, but for hours or entertainment seeing the bickering between the hordes of people in outrage vs that one person who apparently went to their shows regularly and gave sympathetic updates about how this was affecting the band personally. Take his with a grain of salt, as it is only a Western interpretation of what happened and I cannot speak to how it was received by fans who could actually go see them in person. Regardless of where you stood in this fight, history’s take is that it did not end well for Vajra; they broke up shortly after only to be remembered as “that band that tried to be Diru.”
Both examples were, in retrospect, unsuccessful. Ru:Natic, in their heyday, missed the boat on people eating up old-school revival acts by about 3 years, then only played again in one-off events. Vajra, on the other hand, failed for a couple of reasons. The first is that the fan base wasn’t ready for their style of tribute-meets-original-works. Secondly, there wasn’t enough time passed between what they performed and when their source material was released. Based on later act’s success, time helps prevent “a homage” from being seen as “a rip-off.”
Earlier I had mentioned 2013 being the starting point for “homage-kei,” in a more official (but still unofficial) sense. That’s because グリヴァー (GRIEVA) happened and caused a shift in the scene. For those unfamiliar, Grieva’s whole schtick was that they dressed like a modern version of 1998 Dir en grey and made music that sounded like it could have came from from the same time frame. However, after people got a hold of their first album, it became alarming clear that it was one big tribute to “Gauze” (Dir en grey’s first album). A lot of songs “borrowed” the melodies of Gauze-era songs, their music videos were kind of like high school kids reenacting their idol’s work for a class project, and you were even able to draw parallels to the lyrical content. Grieva handled this clearly stating their theme is to bring back the feeling of the old days, and even fabricated a whole interview about how they went on a quest for band members that held the same ideals. Unlike Vajra, when people confronted them by saying “You’re just stealing,” them saying “Yeah, but that’s like the point???” it worked. Granted, there were plenty of people who weren’t buying this act and loathed the whole idea, but there was more than enough support for it to keep them at the forefront of the scene up until 2015. In fact, it worked so well that their label made it happen AGAIN, but this time with a band that pretended to be The GazettE and another that mixed all different concepts from the eroguro scene and western nü-metal together. This was the first time in visual-kei where blatantly copying on purpose wasn’t met with more backlash than praise.
Several other acts spawned at the same time, due to a strong desire for “bands that sound like old school groups.” This was in part due to Cell, an offshoot of La’Mule that made somewhat similar music, Lin, a Kisaki band that came after he swore he was retired, and a general sense of boredom from the run-of-the-mill bands that dressed like host boys. Other groups that come to mind include Gauzes (a La’Mule homage-kei group), DEZERT (their first singles were nü-metal interpretations of groups like D’espairsRay and Nega), and AvelCain (who took more influence from groups like Lamiel than their fan base wanted to admit). Suddenly, it was cool to be like someone else.
Eventually, the hype waned a bit. Grieva started writing their own music and then eventually split after being worked to death by their label. It was mostly the same case for AvelCain, Cell went on break because frontman Kon can’t keep focused on one thing, DEZERT found (and then killed) their own style, and most of the other old school sounding bands weren’t big enough to really make a lasting impact. This was the death of homage-kei.
Or was it???
Interestingly enough, in recent years, this scene metamorphosed along with the scene at large. We started seeing groups now begin to “take influence from” more recent acts (which I guess are still old if you’re younger than 20??). We had メディーナ (Mediena), who took a lot from Phantasmagoria, ガンミ (Ganmi), which sounded like an early 2000s band without a real influence to pin point, and Mamireta, who tried to restart the subculture in high gear with their refreshing takes on 蜉蝣 (Kagerou)’s music. There are even big acts forming side projects that “sound like a 90’s band!!”, like Diaura(who are not guilt-free themselves, when it comes to Pierrot worship) and ぞんび (Zonbi). Even Gossip-ゴシップ- went from copying The GazettE to emulating their label owner’s old band (albeit at gunpoint (allegedly!)). It is worth noting that another significant change: aside from a few examples, the current trend has become "I want to sound like ___," rather than "guess which ___ songs I combined!!!" Arguably, the style should have started with this mentality, but controversy creates buzz.
Unoriginality in the visual kei scene is nothing new. We even have an entire thread dedicated to specific instances where someone took a riff or theme and matches it to the exact source material it came from. But homage-kei really takes it to the next level. Bands want you to know who they’re sounding like. Could it be for nostalgia sales? Or because recreating a well liked motif makes it easier for someone to like a new creation (they’re already emotionally invested)? Or is it just a lazy cash grab, which requires 40% less effort to produce material? Maybe it is fulfilling a fantasy to reenact what you love about your idols? In spite of how much I adore everything mentioned throughout this article, I would be lying to you if I didn’t say that it is probably a mix of all four.
I'm not saying he's dressed as a soldier, I'm just wondering what Japanese people think of the "Japanesque" concepts, particularly costumes based on ancient Japanese traditions etc. I guess the "western" equivalent is like vikings or something now that I think about it a bit more
PIZAZ reacted to Saishu in The Bad Boys of Visual Kei
PIZAZ got a reaction from merchenticneurosis in La'veil Mizeria 祈狂 & 邪鬼 cosplay