CAT5

soko ni naru will release a new album on February 8th, 2017! http://sokoninaru.com/ https://www.facebook.com/sokoninarujp/ https://twitter.com/sokoninaru_band ■ミニアルバム『METALIN』 2017年2月8日発売 KOCA-93／￥1,800＋税 ＜収録曲＞ 1. Break out!!! 2. 新世界より 3. METALIN 4. family 5. 藍色の明日へ 6. 星の行方 7. sayonara blue

Agreed 100%! Especially the part about shuffle. I almost feel like that for each track on the album, you can find an earlier counterpart where THE NOVEMBERS did it better lol. Why choose fast food when you can have gourmet? And downy making the list? Amen. Those guys are brilliant! <3

The new D.A.N is smoooooooooooth! There's also a new ent album out in January!

Wow...the few songs I heard from these guys were cool. Sucks to see them call it quits =/

hunter x hunter (1999)

Somehow I completely missed this! Glad to see Chisa still active in some capacity, and even if it's not anytime soon, I'd very much like to hear him on record again (regardless of whatever musical direction he takes)

So are you saying that you're indefinitely pissed?

Yeah, it's definitely hard to keep tabs of all of the bands outside of VK without a really dedicated community around, as I'm usually late on these things too. I would not have even known about this if I hadn't decided to stalk your twitter lol. In all honesty, I thought their 2015 album was a bit of a mess, but it still sucks to see them go. I LOVED the 2014 EP, and would have liked to see them keep at it. There was a lot of potential there. And of course this happens RIGHT AFTER they go major too. =/

Taken from their twitter, and translated thanks to Hiroki. Their OHP is no longer up, so there's no way to see the comments from the band members. Really sad to see yet another cool band bite the dust.

I'm a bit late, but I just found this out. chouchou merged syrups. disbanded officially on November 23rd. http://chouchoumergedsyrups.com/

Satsuki?????????

A few predictions. THE NOVEMBERS will release either a new single or an EP. I don't think they'll be quiet, whatever the case. 八十八ヶ所巡礼 will drop an actual full-length album to make up for leaving us musicless in 2016. cinema staff will release SOMETHING. these guys have been putting out music like crazy. 凛として時雨 hopefully put out something redeeming. maybe a new single? ....or 凛として時雨 return just to disappoint us again. TK makes another anime theme. This time, his most annoying yet! siraph will drop another amazing EP. another new lynch. album [2] downy goes back into hiding for another 3 years. That's all I got for now. I do hope for new music from some lesser known bands that probably aren't worth mentioning, though.

Yay, DIV! I really enjoyed that DIV ep, and even rated it fairly high early in the year, but unfortunately it kinda fell by the wayside for me as the year progressed. Still great to see them get a mention. It's a shame that they disbanded, as I felt they were on the precipice of a new sound, and really wanted to see where they'd take it. R.I.P! "dramatic", "utssemi", and "OYOGU", definitely! Yep, that's basically what I was getting at. I thought the band found their sweet spot with "Polarize", so the direction they took after that was a bit jarring for me. I thought climax sounded like they're attempt at anison, or at least something more overtly poppy, and while there's nothing wrong with going that route (i love anison stuff XD), I don't think it was a sound that played to their strengths. And YESSSS. Thanks for making that point about the guitar! I also felt that NEWPOESY felt really "safe" in a way...the production is clean to the point that's it's sterile. Spicing things up with more guitar would have been nice. And although I said NEWPOESY is a return to form, I think it's also a step forward for them in a ways too. They've gone back to a more..."natural", dubby style, but there's more r&b/soul vibes on this album than before too!

I'll be in plug in about 2 hours for anyone who's down! plug.dj/monochrome-heaven

This makes me SO delighted to see!!! I know we international fans like to differentiate between VK and non-VK and we tend to associate the term 'J-rock' more heavily with VK bands and perhaps a few mainstream acts, but collaborations like this completely destroy that narrative, and I love it! You have two renown musicians, Aoki Yutaka from downy (a legendary "non-vk" band) and Kaoru of DIR EN GREY (a legendary "vk" band) and I think (or rather I hope) it promotes a more inclusive vision of "J-rock", at least for us international fans. Great to see Morrie and Sugizo involved too. This is going to be quite an interesting album! Looking forward to it!

I haven't seen any information about a new album yet, but we can probably assume that they won't leave us hanging for too much longer. Besides 2016 was a shit year anyways Also I agree, i'm loving this. It's definitely subdued for them, yet still kickass!

NEW Music Video!!! @Pho

http://www.last.fm/user/wesurii/listening-report/year This is super neat! downy completely taking over my year and siraph being my top discovery couldn't be more accurate. I don't really consider Aimer a favorite artist of mine, but she has just a few absolutely killer tracks that have pushed her very high in my charts - "us" being the major culprit here, haha.

The new Ayano Kaneko song is so sweet! <3 It also looks like miaou released visuals for one of the songs on their recently release EP