Karma’s Hat

 

 

GOOD

蘭図 - Inferiority Complex Genuine old school sound and vibes with song variety and Karma. Shows a lot of promise, at its best when total kuroyume worship. Nice

 

EH

DEZERT/MUCC - 蟲／ガチャガチャムクムク This might get knocked down to shit. DEZERT plays a very MUCC-esque song ( just goes to show how strong the influence is, because the stuff right before and during the chorus is totes MUCC ) with X-Japan sections, a pounding nu metal intro and sweet nostalgic sounding chorus that these two bands are kind of known for. MUCC on the other hand does something that sounds pretty much like you'd expect them to at their most, MUCC-like at this stage. I don't know if either band is capable of better music than this at the respective stages of their career with the other sounding like an UNiTE B-side while encroaching their 50's while the other is like a loaf of wonderbread left out in the rain, but despite of that both of these bands suck now and that's it pretty much it. Still not an offensive release, or I'm not sure maybe it is...

 

MUCC - 壊れたピアノとリビングデッド If anything, the new MUCC album is a reminder that miracles can and do happen, and while it's a infinitesimally unlikely to see a long out-of-touch veteran band to kick open the door again, it's at least possible that they'll politely knock on it and open when answered. What I especially like about this album are the clear signs of some veteran savvy and experience which allows them to employ these small experimentations here and there that a young and hungry band can't really pull off without trying to blow over the entire house in the process ( which is of course, to their benefit usually. ) The dub section in the third track, subtle novelty instrument touch on the chorus of the fourth track and so on just employing a wide range of techniques in general. It's not the didgeridoo and triangle up the ass album that some idiots hoped for, and it's not the supposed return of nearly 50 year old men to dabble in an angry young mans game, but it is at the very least a statement that instead of genre hopping from novelty to novelty, from trend to trend like frogs at a pond, MUCC can put everything together and develop organically without embarrassing themselves any further that they already had. 

 

ACME - Last One Show A strong fucking outing. Absolutely the best kind of music that you can get with this style, kind of like what DIV was at their peak. Lighter contemporary vk with just the right amount of dabbling in metalcore for some colour with respectable musicianship is what takes this over the top and honestly aside from Pentagon's best moments and peak Anfiel, I can't name anything better in the style that's around right now. Chisa's fucking great in this too and it takes me back to the first time I listened to that DIV album with the bird on the cover. Good stuff, but what keeps this down at EH is that it's still unfortunately the kind of vk I find corrosive to the true spirit of the filthy kind of vk that I'm looking for. Totally the best this kind of shit around tho.  

 

キズ - 平成 A band I expected to fly straight into the good ends up stunted at the respectable yet not quite there eh. The production is already infamous and it well and truly is just shit. The lead guitar kind of buzzes along as this wall of noise that you can't even hear properly unless you want to destroy your hearing in the process, and even when it's tolerable it is just kind of retarded. I mean, in the third track the gimmick just consists of spastic left and right panning of the guitar! But the songs themselves are for the large part quite alright Kizu B-sides, the A-side included, which means it's their "worst", or most insignificant rather, to date. 東京 the middle of the road snoozer has the distinction of being their least inventive track thus far, completely carried by the vocal melody while the production is trying to hide the shitty riffs panning them somewhere in the far back-left. With all that said tho, Kizu is still a great band with loads of spirit and energy and very able musicians. Now we've just hit the first bump on the road after they kept getting more ambitious with each successive release. 

 

edit: Heisei is a banger. The PV release was brilliant and after reading the lyrics the song I think I've finally caught some wind on what they were going for here. An appropriately melancholic send-off for the Heisei period towards an uncertain future in which our cries for dignity keep on being unanswered.

 

コドモドラゴン - テグラマグラ  The fourth album from a good, albeit flawed band that's easy to like but hard to love, because every time I you want to wrap your arms around them, they pull out the rug from under you. What I mean by that is that they always wimp out at the worst possible times, never committing to the extremes of their sound whenever they hint at doing it. It's vk though, and I'm just projecting. In reality they just do their thing with a distinct style of riffing and vocal performance that occasionally makes them sound more savage than any genericore band like Deviloof and etc. Most of the singles here except the one from the mini shred, even the ballad kind of, and the new songs are okay too! This album is a little bit of a turning back the clock from the mediocre and wimpy WOLFMAN even if it doesn't touch the peaks of their early stuff; and you know maybe they share a lot of similarities with the bands I've filed under shit before, but fuck you I'm partial towards them. At their best, it's some of the most vicious music in the scene. 

 

RAZOR - Undo Imagine Ryoga with real musicians instead of the mickey mouse crew from Born putting out stuff that's kind of along the lines of ACME's Last One Show in a way; lots of section coming and going with blazing speed with Gazette and Lack-co and the likes as the most accurate reference point.  The title track is A+ with the two B-sides veering a bit into the generizette in sound, although rescued by some fun and genuinely creative derivates from the formula, like the breakdown in ADEPT for example. Anyway, shit ain't special but that doesn't mean it isn't working. Good effort from a band that may just go to places if they keep exploring their sound and eventually expand their creative horizons. 

 

ザアザア - 「死んじゃったポチの話」通常盤 This fucking band is so consistently veering from the wrong side to the right one, and then back again. Sometimes MUCC, at others late Kagerou and then it's some indie shit and then they come out chugging. If I had vested more time into them I'd probably be able to discern some consistency on their part, but as someone firmly on the outside it's hard. Anyway, this thing does nothing wrong. They're able and quite creative especially for this environment when bands either choose to chug or be a dreadful bore, these guys mix things up by apparently releasing a single with a six and a half minute A-side that unlike the majority of the genre does kind of through places; resolve its conflict and accelerating to a release by the end of it. The most obvious comparisons are MUCC's long ballads from their first four albums, which however can be misleading since this is as xaa-xaa as it comes. The second track could've been an A-side in itself with a more traditional structure and spotlight being largely on its chorus;  and it's still very sweet and the kind of xaa-xaa that's easy to love. The third track is the most nothing out of the bunch, but dude who cares it's better than gozenreiji and all that shit. The closest thing we got to art-kei right now actually? Probably. 

 

己龍 - 閃光 What can you say about them at this point that hasn't been oft enough repeated the past few years? Some of the best musicians of the scene stand their ground in mediocrity with their talents painfully underutilised. As usual, every once in a while you can catch a glimmer of light shining through somewhere amid the chinese restaurant OST synths that somehow still persist in visual kei like herpes, breaking out when the body is under emotional or physical duress. That said, this is for them a fairly solid single with the A-side being the weakest of the bunch ( but it does have a riff for once! surely on the account of it having been lifted from their older material ) and B-sides making up for it stride. The third track even takes me back to some of their earliest stuff, being a bit more macabre and a bit more varied in instrumentation; actually not even a bit, the seemingly pleasant riffs betray the sinister intents that the vocals come outright with; but as usual with Kiryu the only one sinister here is BP records and the ones betraying me is Kiryu, because surely the next batch of DVD's and singles have already been announced and band the band is hard at work scouring through the members past compositions in order to fill up the BP release quota. Long story short; good single, doesn't touch their peak but doesn't go into the depths either; even at their best now they're just so fucking formulaic and neat & tidy that the more braver sections of the third and fourth track do not provide much comfort. 

 

ラク×ガキ - 視聴動画 This band tricked me and they have are def occupying a EH+ GOOD - space. This band is using a lot of potentially dangerous elements to make something that somehow sneaks into my bias. For a band so new their vocal melodies are so refined that they must've stolen them from somewhere, and I'm quite fine with it. It's this mix of pop punk melodies with this nu metal menhera sound and more than a healthy portion of influence from Maximum the Hormone ( par for the course in vk ) that when standing on their own crumble like a house of cards, have now found a way to support each other and co-exist harmoniously. Excited for the future because it can go p much in any direction. 

 

R指定 - フラッシュバック I totally understand people who don't like this band. They're almost what I'd call deceptively generic and it requires either further listenings to understand what's going on here, or enough listenings and open-mindedness to become partial towards it. Mamo's a simple guy who while doing a very simple guy oozes some sort of charisma that makes you think that conceptually they're trying to go somewhere; and the same can be said about the songs and the rest of the guys performing them as well. It's a very sweet and youthful sound, quite simple and I'd even call them a little bit ambitious at times. You can rest assured that when they put out something there's at least a hint of Dir en grey-esque aspirations filtered through their own sound and concept. Idk, it's nice even if this isn't their best work and whether I'm reading between the lines or filling up gaping holes I don't care much to find out. It's the definition of the EH category right now as it stands. 

 

The THIRTEEN - ALONE／アローン First I have to confess to being ignorant to this bands discography at large and how their sound has progressed the last three years; but even to the ignorant it's clear as day that they've progressed, like, a lot. The THIRTEEN of ALONE／アローン shares close to nil discernible similarities with the band that made CHAINSAW or Liar Liar. I still remember when those came out and as if the general forum goer on here wasn't tired of Sadie enough, it turns out that Mao's next career move was to delve even deeper into the Dir en grey bag of shit and the visual kei ouroboros would've finally been complete; the "neo visual" is doomed to repeat itself, in perpetual mediociry, forever. Cue to late last year and all the sudden those who've been out of the loop begin to see the people who've bothered to follow the band becoming more cautiously positive. Comparisons to Sukekiyo was enough to arouse a morbid curiosity, like at least after all this time I'd be kind of funny to hear Mao do this like when they did Madara. It was kind of new and kind of ok, so off I went to my surprise it wasn't that bad at all at least as far as nu-vk goes. It was actually kind of mind-blowing to hear them being genuinely ambitious so instead of focusing on questionable stylistic choices and still leering mediocrity, I become more interested in them the more I heard of them. Now on ALONE／アローン I think they've managed to round out a lot of the rougher edges like corny pianos and the rest of it that's endemic in shitty visual being gradually purged out of their music release by release. The best moments here are the ones that call to mind more Sukekiyo than say, the Chainsaw. alone without equal is genuinely awesome and it makes them sound far more technically able than they've shown in the past, and 悪女 even has a moments that's pretty liberally influenced by a song on ADORATIO. This is definitely EH territory on the account that the heights we're talking about are few and rather far in-between, but the potential in this band is here, and should this upward surge continue then we can honestly except them to be a force maybe in an years time. I don't think anyone would have ever imagined Mao to front a band that could be called a real art-kei™ successor but with A Matter of Life and Death and alone against all, here we are.

 

ユメリープ - まくろまたー Scrolling through all these I'm seeing a theme when it comes to the visual kei vocalists in 2019: phlegmatic, monotonous, boring; stand back and make room for the king of the visual yard. This guy is so fucking flat and one note it transcends any "traditional" of looking at it. Yumeleep is all about that life and it has no qualms about what it is, and that's evident since this is a band that's perfectly in control of its faculties and whatever it does I'm sure is calculated as a specific stylistic decision, much more than Melvel ever was.  まくろまたー follows as a continuation of the sound they've established first PV onwards, and I have to wonder just how much longer they can keep going doing the same stuff. Whatever the case may be, they're still in their own way a refuge from the totally oversaturated genericore riff market and while the wander on that real estate as well, everything is repurposed into fitting their own image. A total character so Yumeleep comes recommended. If you need to find out what they're like then I suggest looking at the cover art and searching out a PV or two, and after that this mini is a good place to start. A technical improvement in a style that while nice and certainly unique, also has an expiration date looming dangerously close overhead. 

 

SHIT

 

 

アルルカン - ラズルダズル Who likes this shit, like for real though? I remember when they started that their was just the craziness of it all, and that they were probably the most over the top band in their style with all these electronic sounds and breakdowns and nasty screaming and vocal effects that were about x2 more intense than usual at that time. That was then, this is where we're at now. The ferocity is gone, other bands caught up, the vocalist is too one note to actually feign enough talent to carry a song with more aspirations than to just bang, and even if they wanted to bang they can't, 'cause they're old and their dicks don't work. Avoid. 

 

ペンタゴン - カルチャーショック This is almost borderline eh territory. I will explain myself by saying that they have character and some dynamic movement within the framework they've set; a framework which they themselves have already moved a couple of times between LP's, but now I've suppose they've settled themselves down to a niche after some identity searching during their early years. I like annoying music and I think it definitely serves a purpose to be annoying... It's just that the whoo-oohs I have no patience for despite that they do with the cheekier mood of the title track with the chorus holding everything together. I suppose for late Pentagon it's one of their stronger tracks and if they keep it like this I'll give them a certain degree of respect for it, which they will certainly go off to lose by phoning in two meandering, who gives a fuck B-sides. Track number 2 especially my god snooze. Again, who likes this shit? Fuck these guys for wasting the potential they had around the second album & subsequent EP. Narcolepsy in music.

 

 POIDOL - LIPS It's funny that I already started writing this under the "shit" category before I even started the first song. How long will we hear this guitar tone and these riffs in VK by the way? Imagine Codomo Dragon with no personality and being more flirtatious with the Royz-esqueness of this sound and you got something like what the ghost writers of POIDOL envisaged. The cause of POIDOL is to arouse and be fun and to these they've committed themselves to a respectable degree. Are they a little one note? Yes, but so is fucking Codomo most of the time and they make it work. Singer sounds cute, the second track is a prime cut from the style. Fuck it imma maybe bump this to EH. It's very pedestrian nature is off set by my personal bias to something like this. Rigid in its style and by its individual aspects  totally unremarkable, and yet I'd be a lying man if I said it didn't bang throughout its runtime at least a lil. 

 

NAZARE - 荊海 I had to think this over a few times before opting to place it under the shite category in order to maintain the integrity of this 2019 listening project. If I had to describe the sound of NAZARE, it's a distillation of the history of vk metalcore. In light of bands like Jiluka and DIMLIM it's definitely more restrained and traditional harkening back to more pre and turn of the 2010's metalcore bands instead of these super technical, overblown and clean djenty bands that've resorted to maximising all the tools in the toolkit like the aforementioned Jiluka. NAZARE can still get blazing fast and bang while just doing it in a way that sort of makes you think of the stuff we had still had around a few years back, not only in the riffs but because it just sounds a little rough in a good way. The vocalist puts in a performance that's 110% vk through and through, like the dude just sounds rough around the edges in a way that's vk to me, and this visual keiness of the band is emphasised even moreso during the times when they go for these nu-metal indebted Dir en grey-esque athmosphere building section in Judas and another DAY or bust out the melodramatic synth in 受難 in a way that really only vk bands do. So do I like it? At times yeah, but I think many and myself included are just so bored of this style when its so barebones. While new DIMLIM brings in a variety of elements from different places, NAZARE is all about dat life and when it bangs it does bang and sounds filthy while doing it. Unfortunately a lot of these moments are offset by NAZARE dabbling in some trite mid tempo moments and there is even a weak ballad in the mix. I just get bored of this stuff pretty quick, and it's not doing anything groundbreaking or particularly interesting for me to have any respect towards it musically. Just Issei doing Issei things with a decent crew backing him. NAZARE won't make converts, but fans of the style should get something out of the highlights.

 

アスティ - 夢舞う大泥棒 It's a band like these when the line "all new vk sounds the same" feels like it could possibly hold some water. I mean god damn, what's the appeal of these guys? Chinese restaurant OST tier oriental gimmick with the same riffing style as all of the other fucking bands but just with less energy than the tippy top tier of the genre. The vocalist sounds cute sure, but the same can be said for the rest of the scene as well at this point when the scene has essentially become one large front for male prostitution. Deleted immediately after the first listen. Embarrassing that this middle of the road nothing shit has fans. 

 

Insanity Injection - Victim Looking at everything Kyouka's done since Aliene there's no way you'd ever imagine him being in a band that good that was not just good, but in some ways ahead of their time, or at the very least much in tune with it. 

And now, when you look at the cover of this single it looks like he got stuck in a time warp somewhere around the year 2001, and the music kinda sounds like it too. Oddly enough however, the music is actually made out of fairly decent elements and it could even be salvaged if recontextualised, but as it stands what we have here is a budget track made out of d'espairsray mallgoth vibes, Kyouka's impression of the eagles from birdemic and some early 2000's ranging from quite alright to a very bad interpretation of the worst things about D'espairsray. One pair of Kyouka mallgoth pants paired with a neon pink corset out of ten.  

 

マチルダ - キセキニイル The boys put out a mini and I'm looking for the eject button located somewhere in the Mathilda hype train cockpit. This band started out promising with a blistering mid 2000's riff reminiscent of prime Lolita237q and aicle vibes, only to disappoint ever since with limp wristed riffing and the inability to commit to the perverse, to the grotesque in a way this revival kei does when it's at its best. The first track is quite good with the rather phlegmatic vocal delivery being a nice touch and the final track doesn't totally disappoint either. Everything in the middle fails to convince with a lack of energy and character.  

 

DIAURA - DEFINITION Lame shit from a lame band doing lame stuff for years and years now, and of course since it's vk and nothing can happen the worst band ( sort of ) associated with AINS is the one to thrive and survive, or at least languish in its niche the longest. Corny synth blares and yo-ka covers himself to some of the worst riffing in the entire scene. Call if he ever hooks up with the guitarists from Valluna again. 

 

午前零時。 - 好き好き大好き超愛してる。 I'm a sucker for this aesthetic so it's a shame it doesn't hold over to the music itself. A stuffed, asphyxiating sound in all the wrong ways made even worse with the very phlegmatic vocals as monotonous as the guitar sound that just aren't it. At its best this style is done with the dynamic afforded by combining specific traits from all over the visual kei spectrum; vocal melodies from oshare with chugging guitars and 'round back again with jangling 90's guitar melodies in the bad. Gozenreiji adheres to the former two with such religiosity that it might as well had been read from a manual that while in theory I should be all over it, they just suck and have long ways to go despite an acceptable concept. 

 

MEIDARA - 鬼来 The thing that I can't in VK: chinese restaurant OST instrumentation. Excruciating to sit through this throughly witless and charmless record from a band that'll most certainly not be around in a couple years time. Almost made me think Memento Mori was a good band ( it wasn't ) 

 

ACME - 放課後の飼育 Okay, consider this a shit + or perhaps a eh - or something like that. ACME's second single of the year makes an ACME novice like myself already more familiar with the patters that are present here. This is a very technically able band that doesn't shy away from mixing things up, on the surface level that is. They're experts at making the same song with different kinds of flourishes that sound remarkably different yet eerily similar every time; it's like painting the sky every time with a different shade of blue, having it remain essentially the same yet distinctly different on the first glance; and while their first single shone somewhat bright with consistency of tone and its relatively brave style of being like a jacked-up mid period DIV, here what takes the single as an individual release down a notch is that it's just bad value. One new song, three live takes from a band that offers nothing in a live setting that translate over to an audio recording and oddly enough a english take of a song released prior. Is it 2008 again, or just an oddity from a band that while quite okay is at best just as unremarkable as the rest of the disparaged cast of 2019 visual kei. 

 

ゼツ - おもちゃ One of these again. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about once the 2019 genre tropes start rolling in, and despite not being particularly horrible on any front, I'd say that as a betting man I'd never wager on them being commercially or artistically successful in the foreseeable future.  Immediate removal from the music library. 

 

JUPITER - ZEUS For this one I've decided to try out another format of "review." Firstly, even before putting it on I've mentally relegated it to the SHIT category of my personal rating scale, and now it's 14.45 on the 12th of April and I'm about three and a half minutes deep into the second song of the album, the most obnoxiously Japanese power metal titled "Theory of Evolution," and so far there are no signs to me being wrong on my initial assessment of both Jupiter, this album and Hizaki's career in general. Really in the grand scheme of things his entire career trajectory was a slow, plodding escape from visual kei into emulating his western prog power metal heroes. What was visual kei in early Versailles is obviously gone without a trace other than in the fangirl pandering visuals probably only upheld in order to make ends meet for a band so painfully tacky and objectively generic in a style that's in general so exemplary in bad taste that it's pretty much without a rival. Hizaki can shred, this dude can imitate whoever he is imitating and I'm sure the other members are holding up their own ends as well, but fuck, when can we put the fans of this kind of music into camps far away from the general population? Who likes this kind of pompous, glittery rubbish? You call visual kei formulaic then what about this shit? The fourth track is rocking away them riffs and the vocalist goes whoooo; so I am to imagine that someone somewhere just went ahh? Who's that guy to whom is this is that, sort of expression of their soul or inner being so to speak, the kind of manifestation of what they're about, the shit they fuck whit. This is such fucking pathetically limp wristed noodling with the same faux rocking metal attitude and whenever it isn't sounding X it's only able to do this distinction by sounding like Fozzy. That first verse in Straight into the Fire, dude I mean fuck, can we even get Versailles back at this point. Who in 2019 gets excited about these shred solos that isn't fresh from the deepest jungles of Africa and hearing the guitar for the first time ever? Although banging sticks on rocks is liable to create more dignified and elevating music than this mickey mouse garbage. 

 

DEZERT - 「血液がない！ / Call of Rescue」I think DEZERT gets misconstrued in the same way that a lot of visual kei bands do when they sell out. First of is that they weren't good because they were heavy, and at the state that they're in a return to nu-metal wouldn't change a thing; and then second that this shift was completely unprecedented. This band floundered through it's early years ripping off everybody as it shape-shifted from release to release with maybe the only consistent thing being Chiaki's voice, and that a lot of their subject matter revolved around eating fetuses and so on. In want of a better word I'll call this eroguro, which is probably appropriate since it's 110% a visual kei thing and nothing else. There's just no other genre of music that does these juxtapositions of heavy and cute, dark and sweet nostalgia, and obviously grotesque and quite humorous while also totally serious. This is what DEZERT lost, and they lost inch by inch as they crawled to where they're at now; a some sort of a indie rock band of all things. I don't have time for it.

 

DADAROMA - 「デンドロビューム」 Please help / save DADAROMA. The usual consensus on this band is wrong; they didn't lose their way, but people couldn't grasp just how formulaic they were to begin with. The easy answer to why the first two singles bang is that this is a very able-bodied band with hard hitting production and in addition to that they were looking for "inspiration" from my boys at Suicide Silence. So what happens after that? Try heaps of synth, genericore riffs and a party clown concept that for some reason a lot of people still can't accept all these years later. They were always funny like that, even on their very first release which most people chose to somehow ignore save for the nu-kei hit Oboreru Sakana ( although if you ask me, the best song with that title will always be the really early Sadie track. ) But even for those who stuck around despite all this, the abuse still continues in cycles of periodical stripping of synth and clowns and once these ears have pricked up they're abound to descend to the floor once more as this band busts out some shit about masturbation and now, whatever this is. I like the PV song actually, it's probably one of their filthiest sounding with this style because the synth is fucking stupid and over the top; and that said it's all the more sad that the rest of it is the same, fucking, shit they always do. Check the boxes for the fist bumping track and then the totally limp wonder-bread ballad in-between. The fact that they're really tight and can write a decent breakdown and that the vocalist sounds like he came out of the perfect-vk-vocalist generator, it's hard to give to fucks unless you've dedicated yourself to them already, in which case godspeed I hope you find your way. 

 

マチルダ - 人魚の肉 A generisingle from a band that already somehow broke my heart after just releasing one good track. The chorus makes you release which just how little singing ability these dudes get by with, which is fine in itself as long as there's some bloody spirit here. This is, apart from the cool pokemon battle synth, totally forgettable nothing. What they should be focusing their energies on is the aikuru rip off third track. They'll have to make about ten of those before they win me back. 

 

Hueye - 優しく殺して Sometimes things pop on your YouTube algorithm and you don't have any idea why this exactly keeps happening and Donald Duck's Mejibray cousin just happens to be one of these things. Who are these guys and where they come from? I don't know, but what I do know is that they fucking suck and if the Koichi/Tzk cosplaying PV wasn't enough then maybe the Killing Me riff in the second song is, or maybe the filter the vocalist uses to create that authentic Mejibray feels that the bargain bin MiA imposter isn't able to do since after ripping off one riff he just goes into the same chugs every fucking band uses these days. However despite all that, there's something in the arrangements that kind of makes this worth hearing and provided that they don't disband next week, the third song does entail that there is something here, should they ever decide to go beyond third play cosplay and become a band instead. I'm being mean on purpose, at least they're better than some of the other bands I've listened to this year who've mysteriously debuted on my YouTube page. 

 

ヴィルシーナ - 教典 The ultimate indie nobodies super band in 2019's does only a few indie nobodies could ever dream of: an album. What's the contents are herein is hard to evaluate in a manner that would say anything about it's "quality" or anything else substantial spoken in reviewer speak. You can only describe it like you'd describe a fish or a plant. Verxina is so visual-kei that it's almost a lithmus test to anyone who's up to finding out just how much vk they can actually stand. 教典 is one of the most visual kei albums I've ever heard that should be glaringly obvious to anyone after just one song when the terrible city library recording studio guitar sound comes blaring in and when the insane synth is layered in top of it, you know there will be no survivors. The vocalist despite having a storied career in vk terms comes off to me as putting out this Grieve-esque revival kei performance that if it's your thing, it totally is your thing with the rest of it that's on this album. This stuff is strictly for those who've dedicated their lives for this shit and the rest are probably better off keeping a healthy distance; I myself haven't decided yet on which side of the fence I stand on. 

 

CHOKE - CHOKE2 Holy shit dude. This is just an assault on so many levels. Usually western things get interpreted in VK through this visual kei lense, and foreign elements get thus absorbed into its DNA in way that still allows things to remain firmly visual kei. CHOKE however is something else. The most disgusting nu-metal riffs this side of the midwest in the early 2000's with fucking 2010's trap rapping? They're also super excited about their heavy guitar tone; and how about that album cover! I'm speechless, but as much as I respect the balls of the concept it's also agonisingly awful at everything it does and the fact that there's more interludes and remixes here than VK just makes it kind of novel at best. Smoke in Me is the most confusing visual kei ballad of all times, and to add to the confusion I'm just staring at the cholo gangster with a pitbull on the album cover. This is what the liberals warned us about cultural appropriation.