Karma’s Hat

I like the set too. With two long songs it's pretty long as well, and it'll be the first time of me seeing them play an entire album.

he was having problems during the gig before and during that song his voice crapped out completely

If you actually like early DEZERT and other kind of more macabre visual kei from about 10 to 15 years ago and don't like this song and a couple of others from the album, then you're basically just fucking stupid. One of the riffs on this song could pass for something from Aicle or something, and I understand that the tone is very different starting from voice first of all but I don't know what you want every song to be brooding in the same carbon copied way or what. TODAY stinks and then that Knife Koufuku no melody they released suck too. This album does too but only occasionally when it's droning away something blase and TODAY-esque, but at other times it's just about the best thing going right now. I don't know how they managed to shit out two terrible albums before the Moran guy actually started playing guitar like he was from Moran. There's some really cool and crazy stuff in here that's pretty much what I had hoped he'd do when he initially joined the band, only to cash in on this promise literally just once with the riff from Kimi no shikyuu wo sawaru. By the time he started doing something more reminiscent of him, they were doing that indie sound to Call of Rescue and stuff but fuck now in the context of this album it's ok. Since I didn't get the DEZERT I hoped for with Moran-esque guitar playing with the imagery of title nashi and vocals of OG-Chiaki, this is the second best and I'm settling for it. This is better than their second album by the way. I get it that the mood is dark and occasionally things get brutal; what I don't get is how two three songs being sort of vaguely hardcore ( not even close to anything from title nashi ) everyone ignores the dog shit middle part with its terrible ballad and the rest of that nothing of an album. It has to be said also tho that DEZERT was even up to title nashi quite diverse, and even that album has songs that could fit in this new one. It's just that you do a Korn or a Suicide Silence riff once and then the gaijin expectation are set forever ( case and point: dadaroma ) So in short, art kei DEZERT is my friend and now if on the next one they cut out the slacking and get even weirder, then I'm back on board full time. Decent album.

Jesus, you add Akane to the mix and you have the most fucked up selection of bandmen to have ever shared a band together.

on a huge early undercode kick

They're going to make it sound like values of madness I reckon. That's the only way I see it going other than sticking so close to the source material that there's no point. I wish it was sukekiyo doing maboroshi no miyako, hyperlove, victims of love...

It's just so far away and so liable to get cancelled...

He's just completely illiterate to western culture and completely out of touch with the music business in general. In his mind, they're just one big break away from performing Endless Rain at the Superbowl in front of legions of crazed fans losing their minds and John and Jane decorating their bedrooms with X Japan posters. The Japanese rock sensation takes over America! It sounds like big in Japan, except over 30 years ( in some cases 40 ) after the fact. They make fun of Japanese game developers and etc. sometimes for being so rigid and resistant to change or whatever, but what about an aging "rock star" thinking that letting people know how big of a rock star he is that he'll make waves with a fucking poodle rock band in 2019 fronted by an asian grandmother who looks like fucking Yoko-Ono and where the second guitarist has the hair of someone who went to Woodstock 1970. I can't get enough of this saga, I hope they'll eventually write a book on how held on his dream of American conquest until the bitter end* *and just in case someone doesn't know, their movie was literally only 100% a prelude to this big american break happening — and so far that hasn't happened.

Conspiracy theory: the new album has been finished for a long time, but Yoshiki and the label are waiting for X to become a household in the US with all these promotional gimmicks before releasing amid every single bribeable corporate media outlet touting ”THE LEGENDS ARE BACK.” In Yoshiki’s mind the western breakthrough is due any day now, and only because of backroom dealing, share owning and yakuza favours from back in the day when X was printing money everyone is going along with his delusions and Japanese SONY execs are essentially obligated to make all these phonecalls stateside ”hey it’s me again. I owe this guy for all the coke and underaged hookers back in the day so can you just get him on the lineup? Just put him somewhere in the back it doesn’t matter and we’ll sell it to him that he’s going head to head against Beyonce and she’s scared out of her wits that he’ll steal all the buzz. Yeah no worries he’ll buy it, he’s fucked up most of the time anyway...”

It’s obvious the label owes him favours/he invests his own money on this. There was a shill article on the Conde Nast owned pitchfork about the movie that was coming up on p4k’s sponsored fb adverts for well over an year, and writing about a band like X is 100% out of their usual MO. Another one to get such a baffling spotlight on p4k is BTS where their ”How BTS stays radically korean” is still appearing on my feed. This is obviously a paid deal with Conde Nast, and I have no doubt in my mind that this and stuff like X’s american festival gigs are more backroom deals than ”fuck guys, we got to get this dude from the market where no one speaks english and who’s recognised in the west only by crusty power metal fans and weebs who grew up in the early 2000’s on this next to Grande and McCartney.”

Something about this has disaster written all over it

D'espairsray's sound went something like this: first started out as a pretty typical darker vk band for the time with an interest for the mallgoth aesthetic, something which would start overpowering more flagrantly old school sound like the one you mentioned — and eventually the fishnet stockings and rob zombie shit start getting faded out by increasing influences from Linkin Park and other alternative rock. They grew more west-conscious as they went along and I guess imploded right at the moment when that venture went bust. Vk definitely started looking more at itself than at others around the time they disbanded. Monsters though is such a profoundly horrible album that there's absolutely no defending it. I remember even as a bitter as I was about their post-MIRROR stuff when I was a teenager thinking that when Final Call came out that it made the D'espairsray of Horizon and Kamikaze look like a top tier band at the peak of their powers. The band that made Monsters however was completely washed up. I mean listen to this shit myself personally I'm fine with most of the pre-coll:set stuff. Sexual beast is their best

I went back to RYM and suddenly music became interesting again. I don't know if it says something about me or the age we're in that I need to micromanage some internet application like last.fm, rym etc. for me to really put in some thought into my relationship with music. I would like to think that its kind of an aesthetic outlet for me tinker with charts when I'm too lazy to make any music myself and really fill that need to do something with my time.

Surprised no one mentioned the black swan guy and his cat

Went out to see the solo acoustic show of Michael Gira of the Swans fame. Going by the venue being a cafe doubling as a bookshop and the stage setup resembling more a book release event than a concert venue and having Gira with only his guitar in tow I expected it to be a quiet old man in a sweater type of an evening, and then all my expectations of the man showing restraint to tone down his thing flew right out the window once he actually started playing. It's absolutely incredible that he's able to create a wall of sound with his voice alone — like he managed to move like Swans and sound like Swans while sitting down in front of a seated audience. That's incredible. He played mostly new material with the added bonus of God Damn the Sun and New Mind of all things. It was only 10 euros and honestly in retrospect, it was better than a lot of gigs I've payed +30 euro for. Unfortunately I saw not a single person with their phone up ( !!! ) so the footage from this will be unlikely to surface anywhere soon, but looks like there exists some from Greece just a about a week back.

Well here’s to hoping the kuroyume sounds of the EP are going to show up somewhere on this one

The lyrics are really blase compared to what he did with KtK. Disappointed

Yeah I also think this is keeping up the momentum from 4. On here their first two PV tracks have defined their career but really they were about more than that from the start like clowns and masturbation, and all the better heavy sections they most likely just flat out stole because after the Suicide Silence bit in Ame no waltz they haven't really written a single heavy riff or anything that any metalcore band would give the time of day to.

I think a huge part in the Uroboros to DSS sales slump was that the popularity of weeb shit was sinking fast and the promotional machine falling apart by the seams. The optimism for the foreign market must've been massive after 2008 and I'm sure tons of money was spent on promoting Deg overseas with next to no return to that investment. That must've been very disappointing both for the band and management once it was finally realised that they peaked in American and European venue size already back in 2006 and it's only going to be downhill from there no matter what they do. I consider this band entering their old man phase right around when Sukekiyo was formed and Arche was released. The ambition that went to DSS is obviously on a different level to Arche and TiW, but whether that's a good thing depends on what you think of their Monster energy drink-pig squeal-core-Mike Patton-time signature wanking era. To me the band that made everything from Missa to Vulgar ain't the same band as this one. Sometimes when I put on a track like 24k Cylinders or Macabre in the right state of mind I go like fuck, what a fucking band that was. It's the same guitarists farting that fucking dial-up modem sounding chug that made egnirys and 304? I cannot believe it. thank u

First thought here as well unfortunately. I would have preferred Sukekiyo instead doing something like Maboroshi no miyako, Pleasure land, Victims of love, Hyper love etc. etc. their early discography is full of great songs that will not end up being featured instead of the usual suspects.

Might've actually been the moment when the tide turned for them on this board. Not that many people ended up being excited about the full single either thanks to the production and it's obvious that here there's a bias for the darker and heaver, and there was no way they could've kept surprising on that front after 0. Their discography up to now is a real strong body of work and that's obviously reflected in their popularity both abroad and domestically. I do think it's about time however when they're either going to go to new places with their sound, or burn out much of the people following them on MH. In Japan they're going to do great regardless. BP records band shit out the same single over and over and still keep selling.

I finally listened to it and I don't have anything against it. Totally fits their MO as far as I'm concerned with the sound and the lyrics, and it wouldn't be uncharacteristic of them if it was coupled with a track that sounded like Steroid, and I'd be fine even if it wasn't. This band should have to consistently bored with ballads for three releases straight before I would've head ahead and said that something changed. To this day I think their only notoriously awful substandard moment was Tokyo.