Karma’s Hat

@hiroki @Jigsaw9

 Coincidentally my favorite is the Birth of Tragedy. His take-no-prisoners writing style is a great influence and that book is endlessly quotable. I have the great benefit of not being very intellectually concise, so I absorb everything I read with great measure and seeing the world with the theoretical framework of that book in mind is tremendeously entertaining. It also somehow forever convinced me to not like Virgil ( ??? )

"Reborn - Journals & Notebooks 1947 - 1963" by Susan Sontag. A marvellous find from an English bookshop in Poland. The price incredibly enough was less than 10 euros, which is unfathomable for anything this trendy in Finland. The customer service in this country is really cold, but with these boons I'm not complaining.

I'm setting out for journey that could last from weeks to months, and I figured that if I left out all the vk from my phone I'd finally be forced to listen to something else for a change. I started getting withdrawals immediately, so now I'm wiring up the computer with sweaty palms to grab everything I can carry. I'm trash

If anyone visual is procastrinating around Krakow next week then be aware that disposable is in your town and let me know

I'm going to be very disappointed thanks to you all if it doesn't have anything to do with Hitomi or Sui.

I've now listened to both this and the track that was linked on the DECAYS review and I've liked them both despite my best efforts to not to. The impression left by SECRET MODE ( just the song, I listened 2 nuffin els' ) was of this slick pop rock both so inoffensive and meandering that one could hardly attribute a trait to its featureless mass, like musical teflon that'd eventually kill you by lethal poisoning should you indulge in it too much. 

Now first I've had that JUMPIN JACK FOEVAA chorus playing in my head ever since I heard it. You can tell that it's from the same band, but something has happened. It reminded me a lot of visual kei actually, and Drifting Litter has just fortified that impression. I'm getting strange Buck-tick vibes from it, though it could just be from the visuals — which I love, unlike the cool filters dime-a-dozen indie twat written all over the SECRET MODE PV.  Very surprised by this turn of events and I'll get the album forthwith. 

Very difficult to pick. It would be between the third, fourth and current.

A DAMY with quarter the musicianship, if that's even possible. My children will be born blind because of that breakdown

These guys are grinders that have been around forever, and I can't name one song off 'm.

For 2017 I want less riffs like this and this and this too. 

In this climate I think we are liable to get a decent success to mid-period Aicle. The sort of juxtapositions that they did have started to make more than just cursory appearances in a lot of band's styles. We're seeing good interplay of color and extravagance lately in the outfits too. I don't think I'm crazy for holding my breath for such a band to appear. 

What I'm realistically hoping for is that all those Amber Gris, Moran and etc. arCOUGH kei  members settle down into projects that could, please, be around a couple of years and develop in peace. While at it, I'm hoping for more indie rock influence to leak over to subvert all the core. In a perfect world they'd look toward the early period of Rentrer en soi for influence too. 

@hiroki Oh, in what I wrote I was just jestingly mentioning my daydream of a new visual kei-man, which has no basis in reality nor any widescale implications lol. In the deepest recesses of my fancy, what I want out of a lifestyle visual kei is to be drinking in public places and being a nuisance with a couple of mates, until we go in a blaze of pink haired glory. Visual kei manifestos, subversive violence and political terror for naught except a slew of demotapes and a forgotten wikipedia article, ready to be enveloped in time and dust. My own constructions are just me fantastically reflecting my own particular temperament to what I want out of it in a world of my imagining, where I admittedly do fetishise the mere aesthetic of counter culture hehe.  Nais post though so have this like

The counter culture polemic has no bearing on the relevancy of visual kei nor its lasting power I'd say, although it's a good conversation to have regarding the history of rock music and its character. I do agree on the observations about subcultures and their faux-opposition to the establishment, but that's because I'm a stinking commie and feel the entire monetary system and capitalist superstructure ought to be seceded from in an organised revolt with a clear-cut programme of revolutionary despotism ( which certainly isn't born out of art, but vice-versa ). Personally I think dilly dallying with fat record executives and the bloody media is a sordid reactionary affair that I myself would never take part in. This doesn't concern the topic, I just wanted to throw it out there for clarity and entertainment's sake.

What I was concerned with in general was really the lamestream palatability of bijuaru that would in turn translate over to record sales and gigs in my neighborhood. I think the cultural shift of these next 30 years is burying rock music and the conventional music business under a heaping mass of rock and rubble of such mass and proportion that it will not, and could not be excavated from underneath it. How this is relevant is because I think we are feeling the effects of it now. Nothing implodes instantaneously, but rots away slowly, gradually without particular notice from the heavens that people often expect. In the grand scheme our epoch of breakdowns and guitar solos has lasted barely the blink of the cosmic eye, the gust of wind from the turning of the hairy back of time and space to gaze towards this miserable earth; and before anyone knows it we're in flying cars pondering about new aesthetic conjunctions. There's absolutely not a chance in hell that rock music is the kind of an establishment it is now in a few generations. 

Fantastic picture. Shame that the music isn't going to live up to it :V

Time moves on and irrelevant art forms and their instruments get thrown into the very crowded dustbin of history. If you have any doubt about this, I'd like to ask you to name the top 10 premier bebop musicians today, or how about something that sounds like it was from the paradise garage? how about poodle rock? is anyone playing like Weber lately while painting like Monet and catching the salon by storm? They're all gone from the popular consciousness and live as mere perverse retro curiosities ( new post-punk and goth rock fucking eww ) for a handful of people. Scenes, genres and movements always come, go and never come back in the same form. If you ask an enthusiast he'll no doubt tell you about all the killer up and comers, but that's all bunk and they know it too. Nobody's touching Billie Holliday, there's not going to be a new Beatles, nobody's turning back the clock and doing nu-Bach in a manner that won't be scoffed upon by anyone who's serious and in the know. Visual kei in that regard is, to be quite honest, finished. I'd say its creative, artistic peak ended right when the turn of the millenia labels dissolved, and the European boom was caused both by the hot air from that period and the aptness of visual kei musicians to appropriate the emo/scene stylings as mentioned before (see the mallgoth act D'espairsray and nu metal Girugamesh for proof of this ). Visual kei's adaptability has given it such a lifeline for sure. There's not a whole lot of genres that can keep moving the needle and making money both domestically and internationally the way that it has. We've literally outlived and survived the deaths of hair metal, goth and mallcore. Probably only the general metal subculture can boast such a staying power, and they too have been struggling to stay on the surface since all that Anthrax skate metal and the alt-rock Metallica boom faded away. Now even big names can't sell out in fucking _Finland_ and underground classics struggle to pull. In my pessimistic thinking we are at the tail end of this rock guitar saga, and it's due to the gradual withering away of rock music's cultural and demographic base. 

I have my own fantasies about the evolution of visual kei as an active counterculture as opposed to a dull consumer culture. Agendered danger lurking in the metro stations near you; they'll know us by the trail of blood and the smell of hairspray. It's all complete fantasy however that I entertain with like three people max. In reality I know we're over and done with as a seismic cultural force. This however doesn't mean that everything is lost. While I don't think MH contributed to the fad beginning or ending, I certainly think MH has contributed massively to the staying power of visual kei on the internet in an age where everything else is disappearing. That Japanese indie analogy is an apt to make, because there's no reason why we shouldn't be in that same position had there not been these stalwarts of vk culture like MH have withstood the storms of the passing time. This was achieved by the unending dedication and efforts of the core-group that keep coming here year after year after year. If there were double the people with as much heart, perseverance and ability, who knows where we would be. Could the boom period had been extended by the valiant and most importantly of all, smart and applicable endeavors of a few dozen dedicated enthusiasts? I don't know. Bless this website either way and all you people who keep coming and contributing.

I won't dare to wager ( but i'll haughtily speculate ) why the laptop took over rock 'n roll, but stuff like the global demographic shifts were just too much for it overcome. The popular sphere has drastically diversified both nationally and racially. The stuffy dadrock crowd is losing their death grip on the entertainment zeigeist and big festival lineups are a testament to this. The rock bands pulling the big crowds are really fucking old, and the audience is only a notch younger. Sure the vk bands can draw a garage-full of people and enjoy the company of a few snappy young women — that's it though, no one else cares. The faucet has dwindled down to a point where it is increasingly harder for bands to sustain themselves. It just happens to be a form of music that doesn't speak to the majority of people anymore, not to the young person in school or the higher cultural crowd either for that matter. Electronic music is thriving both commercially and artistically, even hip hop is still doing a fabulous job of innovating itself; all the while one of our biggest newcomers ripped off a decade old deathcore album just last year. Even selling CD's in this day and age is dated, and labels are dying to adjust before the inevitable fall. The electronic underground, even hip hop has managed to adjust and evolve to a degree in the way music is released and spread ( a lot of the big names aren't even releasing full LP's anymore. Just songs, for free on youtube and whatever ). 

I'd honestly like to know what kind of social factors contributed to the rise of scene culture. Remember those bands like BrokeNCYDE, BOTDF and etc.? Where were we at the time, as a culture, that stuff like that was tapping into our consciousness. Nothing happens in a vacuum and people don't just decide what to think, feel or do out of the blue. There are reasons for everything in the social and economic fabric of societies and It's an interesting question fo' sure.

 I know my way enough that if I want to make an impression, I wouldn't go telling a cool stranger by four euro latte's that my taste in music is essentially the Japanese Poison and Coal Chamber. I'd embarrass myself either way if I left it at that or started nervously flinging my hands and explaining how deep down this culture is really gr8 and transgressive art. My heart stays true to bijuaru kei either way. I'm going down with the ship and I'll keep on making-a-fool of myself on a daily basis. So that's why this is my favorite thread, because I have a hard time of letting go of the glory days of my youth and its music, endlessly try to rationalise it by intellectual gymnastics. While my death slowly approaches and even the last patches of grey hair are falling out, in my mind I'm still young and full of cum, ready for adventure. 

I have a feeling we're expecting a bit too much from this. While a new Taion is easy to imagine, there's not a whole lot that they'll be able to do to PLEDGE or UNTITLED even with their current sound. I don't think it likely that one or two songs get a completely new look while two others remain relatively the same, that is unless they're really re-working all of them. 

Untitled legit sux thou'. Always thought it was the only boring ballad they ever made, a real dime-a-dozen number on an album that already a couple of misses. PLEDGE is fantastic. Without a trace is a swell addition that just makes me hope for a tru b-sides compilation and b-sides themed tour from them. 

Listening to it finally. Thoughts: 

Definitely picks up from where Last Dance left off. This is a direct descendant from Lycaon that only has had the benefit of simmering beneath the surface for an year. In true visual kei fashion this meant that they probably have 20-30 songs in store. 

The guitarist's role as the driving melodic tool has faded into the background, again. The production booth has been ablaze and all that money Yuuki got from working at a 7/11 during the hiatus has been spent on the blaring synth string bed beneath his vocal hooks. I'd like this if I wasn't so over with them already. I have just tired of their sound, and it finally looks like this is a sound they'll be actually sticking with, because they've obviously been working towards it since Shadow, if not even earlier with Bakane and Akujo. They've domesticated themselves here in favor of a slicker, monochrome iteration of Camera Obscura's rough draft. Conceptually the year off did them good. 

I guess I could one day start vibing to ノスタルジア or 接吻〜くちづけ〜, but now I just don't care. It's not the first time it takes a while for me to get over all the technical limitations and tackiness of a vk band to start being able to peel off the layers of grime to access the very heart of its being and see what those cute bois are really up to. 

14 minutes ago, Peace Heavy mk II said:

 

Kind of just thinking aloud, but does it seem plausible that the decline in interest in vkei and Japanese things in general have to do with the general populace's expectation of someone who likes these things is?

The weeaboo stereotypes were always really bad and everybody knew. Actually, I'd say the weeaboo pogroms were far, far worse ten years ago.

Lol I suddenly recalled this story of MUCC and Girugamesh performing at a metal festival in here back in 2009. They were promptly heckled and treated to chants of Pokemon by the irate heavy metal public. It's not that they hadn't seen shitty novelty acts before since this festival was always full of them, but it was that weeaboos were really considered to be the worst of the absolute worst of people. Everyone thought the bands were trash, that we were trash and we then got treated as such. Even as an act of scene betrayal I remember this weeaboo from middle school who we used to call names and yell at while passing her by in the hallways. I think all the rabid fangirl stereotypes were known and openly mocked, and the clique behavior within the scene was problem even back then and definitely a part of the stereotype.

3 hours ago, aetarna said:

I also remember it was the time v-kei fandom started losing its presence on manga convention - before there was always j-music dedicated room, or even two - one for prelections, events, contests, make-up presentations etc, and other for pv viewing.

 

Oh fuck yeah this. It used to be that the anime conventions catered to the visual kei fans as well, and some activity of that sort was set up. The Tsukicon convention had brief run in Helsinki where they'd also book visual kei bands for the afterparty. This was lineup was very well curated featuring such bands as Screw, Vistlip, Aicle, Dio, Sincrea and Alsdead. 

During the peak years the weebdom had grown separate from the anime community. Cons no longer catered to us and it wasn't a given that a visual kei fan liked anime. I don't watch anime at all and I don't remember when I picked this up, but "narutards" is what I referred to the anime fans as who infringed upon the sacred visual kei space.

Now ten years later: Anime conventions are still going strong, selling out throughout the _entire_ country even months ahead of time. The convention near my parents place in the literal arse crack of the the European continent is always sold out! We can't sell out The Gazette.

2 hours ago, Kaleidoscope said:

Here in Germany, we still have a few concerts every year though and some of them seem to sell quite well - from what I've heard, Nocturnal Bloodlust's show was very crowded.

This was organised in Finland by sheer organic grassroots activity. People moaned about it enough on twitter and spammed the hashtag enough to gain the attention of the band and the promoter. I had a laff about the desperation of the dying weebdom, and then they went out and got it done.  A good amount of people showed up too and I reckon some who weren't big fans came just to show solidarity and experience the feeling these events used to have back then. It also helped that this was for once a good popular band that's on the upward swing, instead of a travelling conman after merch money and Ukrainian women. You book irrelevant bands and you make visual kei irrelevant, and that's a fact.

Having been around and about in the scene back in the day, having talking to people left, right and center: I have this feeling that most of those people didn't download a thing from blogspots and messageboards. In fact the people I introduced to visual kei blogspots were absolutely mind blown that such a places existed, because it wasn't common knowledge. The average people, ie. the paying public who actually did the needle moving in 2006-2009 made due with services ingrained in the culture at large at the time: winmx, limewire and the others, most importantly of all Youtube. It is staggering that there still exists a considerable segment of people who consume visual kei by Youtube or EU-editions only. This is anecdotal on my part obviously, but I'm confident that anyone who actively took part in the fad in Europe wouldn't outright disagree with the observation. One should never forget that most of the people are pretty dumb, and back in 2006-2009 not everyone was as internet savvy as today either. I legitimately think that those who actually were the monetarily contributing members of the swell in popularity hardly made themselves a presence on the messageboards, livejournals and etc. They just went to shows, bought EU-presses and lived out their bum lives in peace until kpop or adulthood came knocking. 

1 hour ago, helcchi said:

Also communities and individuals migrating from livejournal to tumblr might've been a factor as well. It created a mess at the time and information sources became convoluted.

I think this is the biggest contributing factor to the divisions within the existing hardcore community. Message board culture isn't what it used to be in general ( In vk I think that lj -> tumblr migration is one cause of this. ain't no1 got time 2 write ), and a majority people prefer to spam pictures and communicate with a character limit.

A lot of folk aren't cut for that message board life either, and this place especially I can imagine freaks out A LOT of people. As far as message boards go MH has been the premier destination for a long time, but there are people even in my circle who don't like to read or post here due to the perceived "hostile" atmosphere ( well... they're not exactly wrong on that count). So those at least in the anglosphere prefer Twitter and Tumblr, which is where you definitely have to go these days if you want to make friends. 

What this sort of reminds me of is a group of activists spreading leaflets and their bi-monthly journals on the street and wondering why no one cares. They're not losing heart though, because back in the 60's their predecessors were a force, so naturally history should just be cyclical and one day we'll be back in the mix doing what we've always done! Organise those fucking SANA and Satsuki concerts until not even the bouncers show up: then blame the fans and the bands for being lazy and greedy. A good allegory is that there's no party without a base and there's no base without a party. It's a puzzle that we most likely will never be able to solve and in a good 30-50 years when rock music is completely irrelevant and faded under the wave of flying cars and synthesiser music, we'll be right there with 'm. Like @TheStoicsaid the winds of popular culture are so against us that it's an uphill struggle to gain any notice in the wider world, and in addition we as the underground fucked up on the organisational front to even grant ourselves the whatever few shows we did used to get annually. 

I'm surprised that 2009 was the peak. It was already around that time I was complainin' how there's no good shows to attend lol. With that said, those shows that we did have sold very well and a few bands could even venture to have gigs in the second largest city of the country as well. 

I reckon the pop culture peak of visual kei in Finland was in 2007-2008 when the odd few bands made the telly and got gifted some magazine space. Shows were packed, the fashion was wild, no koreans gnawing in on the real estate, events that were associated with visual kei could actually be held at relatively low risk.

What's up for debate though, is how the new fanbase of the peak years wasn't able to recover from the crucial wave of hiatus', disbandments and stylistic changes that the most popular bands went through around the turn of the 2010's. Everyone should recall how often one heard people lamenting on the state of the scene with ambiguous claims of a lack of X, Y and Z, setting the scene for the gradual petering out either to the clutches of the koreans or just general normalcy. This is the way of the flesh for a fad certainly, and nobody is able to sustain creative output nor popularity for an extended period of time, but that's not all that there is to it. I suppose among great many other things, it's not unjust to consider public merely as fickle if their visual kei habit was dependent on the existence of Dio and Unsraw. Visual kei on the internet had good enough infrastructure to allow these people to discover new and old bands with relative ease, but one should still never underestimate the stupidity and the incapability of the rank and file to utilize such tools perfectly well in their disposal. There are still people who'll waltz into a conversation, feigning willful ignorance, saying "OH THESE BANDS OF TODAY AREN'T LIKE THE GIRUGAMESH OF YORE. SO WHAT HAPPENED WITH THAT VISUAL KEI?". This means that relative interest is there; they haven't forgotten about it, so what gives? 

A certain contributing factor that I don't think gets brought up enough is the bush league organising and the sheer ineptitude of the promoters. The fad really blew its wad during the two years it was at its peak, and it wasn't sustainable. Absurdly dumb, dead certainly set for failure, shows got booked even as late as 2015: and anyone with a lick of sense ought to know that in the long term a no-show is always better than a small-shit show. When you're flopping the proper course of action is never to keep on flopping until you can flop no more, but to change the approach. Rest assured a lot of money and contacts have been squandered by idiots already one foot out the door. Unsraw's European tour is a classic example, and Merry's a more recent one. If you're not able to project that there's no demand, and that by booking this there'll be no demand in the future, then you're simply not helping.  

The networking on the local level wasn't great and at its worst there were even open divisions between the fanbase of privileged rich blogger cunts and those who took the train to shows from their shit provincial towns who could barely afford the mcdonald's and second hand converse ( I confess my dislike of the former, but I'm not merely projecting it. I heard many other people voice it also, completely unprovoked by yours truly. ) When enough shows and events are abjectly booked to fail with a lack of camaraderie to match, the rot is aggravated to spread into the brain, and eventually even the life support in form of a Gazette european tour won't do you no good. Their 2016 show in Helsinki did not sell out. That's equal to the sky falling out in visual kei terms.

A curious example of grassroots level organising seemingly done correct: take a look at the pictures of SANA's recent solo tour from from the backarse of eastern europe. Going through all those pictures you'll notice that while the central and western European crowds are only a handful at best, the Russian and Ukrainian shows pull a kind of a crowd that man of SANA's stature has no right of pulling. I'm terribly interested to find out how they've managed to do this. The only reason I can manage to come up with by speculation alone is that the fans of "Japanese stuff" are so organised, if not rabid, that when something is organised, enough effort is done that it'll pull enough solidarity to maintain the scene's health. I swear to God one of those Sana crowds has equal heads to what EAT YOU ALIVE or heidi had here in the past three years. It can't be that there's more fans of this shit there than in here just by sheer chance, luck and coincidence. 

7 hours ago, 『 A F E R N I 』 said:

3.) Lil Uzi Vert - LEAN (Single)

 

Well this is something else I did kind of keep up with. I played Lil Uzi Vs. The World a lot when it came out. 

Young Thug's 2016, as well as his 2015, was undisputably my favorite thing in rap this year. Other's that I liked were YG's entire year, Drake, Travi$ Scott, 21 Savage, Migos - well Atlanta in general. There was a lot that I liked that I can scarcely recall on the spot. Even Denzel Curry I thought was quite alright, even though he sort of gives me the Hopsin geek vibes which really turn me off. Chance annoys the piss out of me and Danny Brown's album was a heap of shite. That's about as brief of a summary as I could pull off.

There came out some decent stuff from the UK that ought to be noted, but I'm not that well-versed on those. Skepta's album I fancied overrated, despite the hype that I reckon mostly came from people who finally found a British black man making music palatable for the American more novel than anything else. Either way it's a good thing that grime, dancehall and all that other junk keeps getting trendier. 

My new year's resolution is to keep music ratings to chart everyfin that goes in the world. 

1 hour ago, freesia said:

”the GazettE結成15周年。全曲再録による初のバーラドベストアルバム。”

This says it would be their first re-recorded ballad best album.

Re-recorded taion holy shit

1 hour ago, freesia said:

oh wow, all those songs re-recorded!

Re-recorded? Where does it say that. THat'd be cool if it was the case though, because otherwise this is pointless in 2016, even if the idea of 50 minutes of gazeballads in succession  is sort of neat.

Never before have I been this boring with music for a twelve month period. My listening habit only started picking up steam in late November, so I'm hopelessly unaware of most things that have been going on in 2016. There's an exception though, and that's vk. I reckon I've at least sampled a lot of the releases that have come about here, and with that I can - by being liberal with the end of the year format - do a writeup of sorts on 2016 on my vk. Behold how amusical I am that this is all I got:

Album of the year - DIAVOLO by The Gallo

There's something to be said about these vk bands that are like the erect stamen of a flower dry heaving under the weight of a sojourning bee, ready to burst its ovula into bice mercurial goo of junkers flying overhead the dark big city alleys where starved street urchins are turning tricks for wartime sustenance. They started out with a rather basic and limited arsenal, but ever since their virtuosity started to gradually increase Jojo has become a madman and the frantic riffing is not behind. With the gimmick comes inevitable, although a completely harmless, comparison with Merry and think what thou wilt, unlike them, The Gallo hasn't domesticated their sound one bit and keeps going toward the extremes all their predecessors long abandoned. 

Fabulous concept, savage lyrics and unhindered by a lot of the things that hurt their other contemporaries, namely a lack of musicianship and the opportunity to conceptually flesh out their releases due to label obligation or otherwise. 

EP of the year - 絶叫！by Pentagon and 不完全な音楽 by Chanty

Pentagon has really hit their stride after managing to figure out their concept after the, in my opinion, disastrous first album. The singles boy waltz and Jesus Phobia were great, yet the second album as a whole was exhausting almost to the point of occasionally being trite, but this rules. I think the obnoxiously flashy juxtaposition of hirokicore and metalcore is found nowhere else with such a schmaltzy grace about it. 

Chanty was just pretty good. Idk. I really like them despite not being able to put my finger on why it is so.

Compilation of the year - End of Corruption World by Rin and 六道輪廻 by Avelcain

Among the ranks of unfortunate disbandments this year, my boi kisaki's was the most heartrending. With Sui and Mizari in the fold I was sold immediately after the first single they put out. It also helps that I'm completely partial to Sui's voice and rather dislike Riku's; and speaking of schmaltz, the former just floors me multiple times throughout. Persecution Complex causes me to bite the side of my cheek and the remakes of Silent To My Pain and Psalms and Lamentations rule. 

Avelcain got kind of shit by 2016. The last single undisputably the most tired excuse for a release all year with the PV close in tow for its respective dishonors. That however doesn't affect the savagery of the early output. The intention shines through the murky layers of poor musicianship and flaccid nu metal riffing, the spirit uplifts Karma's performance and lets it soar. These were at one point the most miserable men in visual kei, and this three disc collection will serve as an interesting footnote in the genre's history. Anyone who's not into Karma's shtick should consider not listening to visual kei in the first place. Finish that business school to feed your ugly kids while your sexually dissatisfied wife has to work double shifts to pay for the lies of her therapist. The real vk connoisseurs will hail to the true intense vampires in the meantime. We miss you Karma

Fav singles runs - Everything Mejibray and DADAROMA put out

My absolute favorites of the scene are always really boring. My two favorite vk albums are by Kuroyume, my favorite bands list is like a VK primer and my favs of today are never anything left field nor particularly exciting. No casettes, no live dists, no nuffin. My taste in visual kei just happens to always be in tune with the zeitgeist; I go weak in the knees for cute boys, metalcore riffs and the kind of melodramatic choruses all these bands have these days. Mejibray and Dadaroma are in my opinion the brutal kei™ top tier at this juncture. Mejibray is of a rougher sort than the ultra polished DADAROMA, but what they have in common is personality, profile and a distinct sound. While I agree that the DADAROMA LP was a disappointing glorified best-of and Mejibray's B-sides are kind of shite, that stuff just doesn't really matter to me. These bands live and die by the purity of their character, the vibes I get from them intuitively. They register into my consciousness as a big deal, and who am I to argue with myself DUH. Mejibray and DADAROMA check my 2010's vk boxes.

Other stuff I liked from this year

Anfiel's singles were on point. Fabulous A-sides with the B-sides to match

Codomo Dragon released a solid album that's more of the same, and that's what I enjoy. Won't make any converts. 

Kuroyuri to Kage's EP was good. Like Codomo Dragon it's more of the same, but with Kuroyuri to kage there's an even bigger risk that their novelty will wear thin. So far it hasn't.

Everything DEZERT put out was decent. I'm getting bad vibes. This band is going to start sucking soon.

God and the death stars put out an EP that was good

Sukekiyo had a single that was good

The title track is this band in peak form. The other two songs aren't bad either, but their PV songs are always something else

Better than initial'l

+ looks great

- i'll never get to see it