Karma’s Hat

Karma’s hat

People make fun but I actually really do feel the lyrics on tmoab. It’s basically about people saying they’re all fakes and it’s all a show and how that comes from this conformist crabs in the pot attitude where anything different you do is instantly put down and the only option given to you is to fall in line. And I mean it’s not very original subject matter ( except in vk at this time ) but no one else threatened to fuck my parents so A+ for effort. I felt that they returned to this subject matter a bit in the last album where he also goes that ”it’s not for you” but for himself and what he wants and needs to do to make life at least half tolerable

I was hungover when I wrote that so I'm going to reiterate what I meant a little bit. There's not a whole lot of experimentation going on or anything like that and it totally sounds like tokage said that an AI figured out how to make a MUCC song out of a template. They try out a lot of different things that don't sound a whole lot different from each other, and aside from the track with hazuki ( where he spams the same squeel he spammed on their recent equally forgettable who gives a shit album ) none of these tracks are a huge mess or a disaster, and when they use things like pianos and goofy synth it's done with the finesse of veterans and while not embarrassing themselves it's still, to me, really fucking boring. This is like a B-version of their last album with more stuff in it, and only things I liked here are featured on that one in a better context, like Tatsurou's vocals on Kurage. The hevier stuff here on the other hand is faaaaaaaaaar worse. Tokage mentioned that jumpdafuqup nu metal bounce guitar and it appeared literally copypasted on the first three tracks. The ballads are also some of the most boring stuff I've heard them do. I don't know how they're motivated enough to keep going as a band if it ends up being tracks like Spica.

A group of aging musicians throwing the kitchen sink in a flailing effort that has too much combined skill and experience to be anything laughably bad. Unfortunately that doesn't stop it from being dreadfully boring and tedious to sit through. They're basically in this part of their careers where they are reaching into every direction, like bringing up that nu metal bounce from their past and the fascination with novelty instruments and other gimmickry to liven up the arrangements that are basically par for the course for them. A bunch of dudes who know how to make songs had a bunch of ideas and this is what came out of it.

the clips from this live were incredible. so stoked for this

That’s unfortunate that it is like that even when I’d presume things actually grow there in that climate. In Finland the market is also more expensive, but in eastern europe it’s often both cheaper and far better quality than the shop.

If you have a bazaar nearby where you're at then I suggest just going for that. When I get back home I'm now on just going to buy most if not all my foodstuffs from old ladies selling things from the back of their truck rather than from some oligarchic market chain fuck that shit. One thing I've actually learned about myself is that I'm not anti-social or introverted, it's just that this bullshit dehumanising society pushed me into thinking I was one. I actually really like small talking with vendors just like I liked talking with customers when I was working in a bar no matter how stupid they are, which I would have never expected when I spent like 25 years avoiding the looks from neighbors and other people in transport. It's just a different, more humane environment where you can be how you are and you're in no rush to get anywhere to slave away for someone else's profit.

I think a lot of that feeling of people coming and going stems from the western boom years and like other people said, from the fact that it has somehow been hogtied into the same brain rot caravan with Kpop and therefore people tend to become aware of both simultaneously, allowing for lateral movement between the two. Then there's that other breed of us getting into our 30's finally coming to grips with mortality and that this is a very fruitless endeavor, so now there's also these existential crisis' going on with the older guard. This basically goes a long way to explain why everyone in this scene is so fucking stupid, you were either into a dumb fad when you got in or you were dumb enough to stay for too long. But like, about the psychology of people who come and go, being gya one day and rastafari the next — I never got that. I have, my entire life more or less, liked the same things and I never really dropped out of anything. There's some faux pas you'll find from the times when I was like exploring stuff like western metal when I was 16, but everyone goes through that one way or another when you build your frame of reference and refine your taste and ideas of what music should be about. The people who change every word in their bio on an yearly basis with only the words "I stan" remaining in place can't be counted on for anything. How do they even finish meals is beyond me let alone stick with something when everything they do is so dependent on if the weather is fair. They're the same people who'll abandon their folks into a home, but take a taxi from another city once the inheritance is on offer; just picking the carcass of cultural capital that other people worked for, that other people laboured to put out there. I'm in this shit for the long haul and this relationship will end only when one of us dies, either me or the scene. No matter how reprehensible I think the scene operates or what I think of the fucking people in it, it's still important to me.

Trust me, you struggle to find people who remember him in Sweden. You have to prod like 5 minutes and then they'll go like "oh yeah that guy"

Yohio is not just some dude like the guys from Emmuree or like Aie who do visual kei as a lifestyle for the love of the sport. He is a sunglasses-indoors-wearing blowhard who's portraying himself as a living legend hot shit CEO. For him to not reach a certain level he aspires to would be devastating. It's make it or break it for him to get there right now with the vision he had envisaged years ago with KEIOS, Desaiha, Lovelipop etc. And I actually have to disagree, I don't think he is that productive. Right now is the only time he has been consistent since the melodifestivalen hype when he put out two albums in short order, which ended after they forgot about him in Sweden and his second attempt at Eurovision flopped. His release schedule right now is making me so angry, like why does he put out single songs constantly without even really promoting them before he moves on to promoting the next one! The only good rollout he has done recently was for his previous solo track. It'd do better to have put out all the english DISREIGN tracks as a EP because they're already super mediocre so at least you could put 4 or 5 in one package with a PV and a ballad and promote it for weeks and not move on from one to the next without anyone caring. No one has a relationship with the English DISREIGN and I've seen even his fans being confused and unenthusiastic. Right now there's a new DISREIGN track coming up with almost no warning and he already has three DISREIGN releases in the bag without a PV, and those PVs are his most popular content. He should've put out the DISREIGN tracks as an EP as well that he really actually promoted, and done the legwork in Japan if possible. I just don't think he can stomach playing second fiddle at a multi-man event where only 3 people came to see him, because unlike what his socials would tell you I don't think he can even draw a decent crowd in Stockholm, let alone in Japan. My armchair booking for him would be releasing YOHIO solo tracks as stand-alone and build up for the album like he's doing, then DISREIGN and english DISREIGN tracks as either 2 track singles or minis with PVs. And it's better for him to put out one release a year that he'd promote right, instead of shitting out tracks without promoting any of them. Less is more etc. And while I'm sure he is busy playing CEO right now with dad's cash, he could even take a video of him recording something and post it as a daily Vlog because his ( small ) fanbase loves that. The way he abandoned his Patreon too just lowers the value of his brand and decreases the trust between him and the people dumb enough to pay for this trash. And this thread is great because after all, I think all this western stuff does deserve attention. For one, it's an outgrowth from vk culture so it is interesting in like a scholarly sense, and second the ones that are doing this are the ones who are brave and stupid enough to realise the dreams that more than a few members of this board have had myself included; and as an extension of that it's our duty to savagely tear down their hopes and dreams if necessary. If I was doing music I wouldn't have it any other way.

Yeah I also think there's a good chance he has bought at least a good portion of those views. I just find strange that he doesn't apply the same philosophy to the rest of his content. The Mitsugi guy struggles to get 200 views even, and half of the comments are yohio commenting under the Yohio account, Keios entertainment account, Rehn music group account and others. Anyway I find him very fascinating and endlessly entertaining. He was really unproductive around 2018 and early 2019 and seemed to have been in depression around that time according to twitter, only to self-help himself back to shape for the latter half of 2019 when he started his big campaign to get KEIOS finally going after numerous false starts the 8 odd years prior. On the website they have purged the labels real history, like his girl group, Mitsugi Senior Oskar Bruzell or something like that who appears to have become a member of the Swedish liberal right wing party since; and speaking of right wing, the Ex-Yohio drummer who was also the drummer for Marduk was caught ordering nazi merch with Arioch/Mortuus lmao. So Yohio the band is actually, according to the logic of guilty by association, tied to the far right. I'm going to hedge my bets on him continuing almost until the end 2020 before he gives up and becomes inactive again, but I wouldn't put it past him to give up by mid autumn either I imo the Keios resurgence is already losing stream. If they're paying for views then the majority of their income has to come from being featured on Melodifestivalen playlists on spotify, and that can't be a whole lot of money in 2020.

Recently I've been wondering about the seemingly gigantic social media following of certain Swedish visual kei personalities, and how little traffic they actually do get despite of it. Case and point: The Weebkei King Yohimbe has been on a massive release and promotion campaign for his record label. Having previously been in the habit of starting something and abandoning it only moments later, he's now been on this kick for more than a few months, even putting out new stuff by DISREIGN, English DISREIGN, some gaijin chump who nobody listens to and sings with a really hokey put-on gravely voice called Mitsugi and then his solo stuff. He still hasn't gotten rid of all his old habits tho, since he has in the meantime stopped doing both his podcast and daily vlogs, and is extremely unproductive on Patreon for his astonishingly perseverant 21 patrons. All of this hasn't made him get any bigger numbers than before, and I think we all know that he has hit the ceiling with his flop career a long time ago. That's not what I'm trying to get at though. When he puts out a PV it goes into 100k's of views in relatively short order, but when he puts out anything else it literally makes no numbers whatsoever. He put out a new song two days ago and it ended up auto-generated on Youtube under his channel name, and in two days it has gotten only 2.7k views. What about the tweet with the preview of the track? 374 likes. Somehow while my boy is more active than he has ever been, he only does huge numbers for a selected handful of songs with PVs just like he always has, his twitter numbers continue to trend downwards and the spike he got for his Youtube channel subscribers a long while back is highly suspicious to say the least. Even the attention that he appears to get for his PVs doesn't translate to anything else, because his label and projects that are in it are languishing in obscurity. How does that work? I know Nocturnal Serenade was promoted by the Youtube algorithm, but surely not all his PVs can be that lucky, unless he has come up with a way to really game the system. How does this shit work

The inventor of air-instore will debut his air-CD

Yeah obviously the best time would've been to finagle his flop festival lives in the west around the release of IV and then utilise all the good will they had from the Japanese press and their old global fanbase and put out that hunk of shit right after it, settle for whatever attention came out of the novelty of these old washed up Yoko-ono looking retirees being back and then commence on a world tour consisting of dozen dates in big venues. Lol nope tho, he'll wait forever because in his mind, they're just one big break away from being the "biggest band in the world" and he already has his managers and yakuza people calling in favors to get him to play piano for the animated corpse of Joe Biden in the white house once he's elected. He'll settle for nothing less.

It's not going to come out. Why? He's still after all this time waiting for his break in the west, and the album rollout will commence only after that happens or he gives up in the market completely ( which is unlikely, he'll have to have terminal cancer and a desire to Blackstar himself for that to happen ) and not a moment before.

Inb4 drum machine

To me they sounded really dated even when they came out three years ago. There were already different fads and cliches in operation rather than Royzsynth and big budget Heisei Ishin. I just went to check out what they had done recently, and yeah they had updated their sound and look to go along more with what's hot now. They look and sound like a Sims 2 character creator R-shitei cover band another recent track is more in line what they used to be, but the PV was uploaded three months ago and it has only 22k views. That's absolutely woeful for a band with a budget like that and it's pretty self-evident that GOEMON pulled the plug on them.

A fantastic live. The guitarist is a real talent and I doubt the band will recover from losing him, unfortunately. Him crying through the last song was heartbreaking to watch

karma's been foreclosed on damn

Fuck, there's too many to remember. Lately I've been playing early UCP singles like anything from Vidoll, Depression Sign by 12012, Hurts and then also Dolly peaked on their early singles as well. The above mentioned 麗しき仮面の招待状 is my favorite Gackt era MM song too. I'd love to get back to this with a few days to prepare

Yeah I also thought this was super mediocre, and my enjoyment of their two prior singles had a good helping of wishful thinking and good will. As much as I still do like the A-sides from those, I have to say there isn't really anything there that puts them over other recent stuff from the scene that I like for me. I just love Ai's voice and aesthetic enough to color inbetween the lines thinking all of this is just a prelude to a sick second act where they bring out the big guns. Real talk: what's here are middle of the road heavy riffs that Ai is able to elevate into something that's kind of cool. The two metalcore riffs are nothing that we don't see from all the other bands too. What I wanted from this band was Ai to go all in, abandon the uwa uwa Korn shit and sing that undead school boy haunting the country road from school when the moon is full and cicadas sing shit. Maybe some Grieva-esque old school riffs too, creepy stuff like what KtK was every once in a while. Sousaku Negai, Hesonoo, you know that stuff. So far this imo just a shittier and occasionally poppier KtK that also has metalcore riffs. fourth track 0.51- is also without a doubt from something else. the fucking la la la part too I reckon.

Well, at least the guys from Gosan were in tons of bands before and progressed very slowly. They've been around for five years and their early stuff sounds pretty rough both production and composition wise compared to the way they've streamlined that one song they can do into an entire career later on. POIDOL has only one guy with previous band history, and they sounded really polished straight out of the gate and were basically headhunted by Cindykate guy. If there ever was a ghost writer in vk, this is one of those bands that would've had one.

wasn't this the "shitty band that uses a ghost writer" according to Gosan Really the worst band from their label. I think I did see them on the oricon like once or something but I have to imagine they had huge expectations for these guys that weren't cashed in

I won’t even bother with 128kb/s unless it’s rarez and I absolutely have to, and usually those are tapes recorded in a basement with an xbox 360 headset so it’s not that big of a deal. A CD release I wouldn’t listen to in 128kb/s at this point no matter what it is. And also especially in vk those old bad rips are weird and sometimes it doesn’t stop at the bitrate, but the songs might be compiled from different releases, half of them might be youtube rips that cut off prematurely etc. If I get the feeling the rip is from before 2010 I get those very sparingly.