saltofstones

Wow ok, barring natural disasters/the end of the world, this is actually being released. Much excite!

Congrats for not disbanding! Now I hope for something better than "Hentai", that one only got a pass for etching that "hentai-hentai" segment in my brain for weeks. Kind of excited, kind of apprehensive too.

Now this is more like it, all the other post-Psysalia Toru projects made me want to run for the hills. Just like Shion's band, this one song doesn't sound so far off the sound Psysalia had crafted, but let's see what else they have in store. I really hope PPP won't have segregated into seemingly substandard versions of itself.

I've had disbandment paranoia with them like every other year, this time it might finally be legit. Or they might just defy my alarmist projections once again. Let's hope it's the latter, more so since their latest album has finally grown on me. If not, then oh well.

Always in for Jellyfish Kei ;_;

@Jigsaw9 Thanks for the heads up! I may be totally broke right now, but! salary day is tomorrow. Honestly I'm missing the emotional vulnerability and experimentation of Psysalia in these 2 songs, but this IS a different band. I need to lay off the nostalgia glasses.

For the love of all things sacred, how come I did not know about this? I literally just woke up to this news and I am struggling to form coherent thoughts. Although going by the 2 PVs above, the music really doesn't sound like it's going to hold a candle to Psysalia, hearing Shion's voice again makes me so overwhelmed with emotion. And now I miss Psysalia again. /cheese

Sweet! It's been a long time coming.

Lol guy on the left is wearing my grandma's bedspread. Can't unsee.

I love how his space kitten voice goes with the instrumentals. It's so cutesy sad and precious.

Gothic Progressive what? Uhh kinda interested in hearing how their genre-bending aspirations pan out. Reminds me of RoqudamaCarta and his self-appointed "gothgressive" designation, now it's these guys taking it a step further.

Hearing choirs of angels over this announcement, as ironic as it may be. But I'm still half in disbelief we're actually getting this, as the saying goes, it's not over till it's over.

This conjures up some impressions of both Plastic Tree and Xaa-Xaa somehow. Interest in this band officially reignited, I don't think whatever I heard from them before sounded anything like this or particularly stood out. Might go back and listen more intently till the album drops.

In the "especially cringe" department, there's "artiste extraordinaire" HITT revealing his bare chest to show us he had stickers on his nipples with his own face printed on them. He then proceeded to detach them and threw them in the audience, to the ecstatic cheers of the crowd. I'll concede that hysterical laughter alone was worth the price of admission.

I grew up without having any concept of my mom's taste in music, she never seemed to actively listen to much of anything at all. I'm sure she had her preferences in her youth, but they did not cross over to her adult years. I vaguely recall asking her once about her nonexistent interest in music, but I can't remember her response. My dad listens to whatever cringy Romanian pop is on TV and also inexplicably loves Nightwish. He also loved opening all the windows in our home and blaring Nightwish on full volume for the whole world to hear, to my utter horror. He also sabotaged my Last.fm one time too many. I know he used to be into Depeche Mode when he was young, sadly not anymore. Surely would have been preferable to what he's into now. Thinking back, I have no idea how my and my sister's voracious appetite for music came about since it surely wasn't cultivated in our household in any way. In fact, I have more memories of our dad asking us to "turn that damn cassette player off already" than anything else. Years later, he finally and inadvertently took his revenge on us with Nightwish I guess, with mostly me bearing the brunt of it while my sister had escaped to college in the capital.

Love this. Liking it more than both "Yoru no Curtain" and "Alan".

Well I hope if they're gonna burn themselves out, at least they're gonna make it worthwhile and have some fun material in there. I wasn't too enthused about their latest output, but their recent singles were all killer so I'm kinda looking forward to this, rip-offs and all.

Fuck yeah spontaneous MH get-together! All planets aligned for one hell of a night xD

Ow, no VK project with a random Romanian word in the name then? Could've started something.

This is such great news, I really thought this band was done for good. I remember I was mildly devastated when they called it quits back when I still cared about bands disbanding.

I had a very similar experience at the Dir en grey concert in Hungary a few years ago. I was so excited I was finally seeing one of my favorite bands, but the concert was a mess, not because of them, but because of the fans and the venue. Everyone kept pushing and pushing and trying to steal each other's spots although where I was, it was already relatively close to the stage. Instead of enjoying the concert I had to make sure I wasn't going to get pushed around. Then the heat was just insufferable, both because the club had poor ventilation and because everyone was clogging the place as much as possible trying to sneak in closer. People were fainting left and right, the staff kept getting people out throughout the whole thing and distributing water. I think maybe half of the VIP concert goers sitting in the front fainted. And of course whenever someone fainted and was taken out, everyone rushed to take that space and the crowd would just push you closer regardless of your will. That's how I ended up in the second row where the heat was just terrible, and even there, someone behind me kept trying to sneak in front. Because apparently sitting in the 3rd row was not good enough. Eventually I started feeling dizzy too and before I joined the fainted, I paved my way to the back where I could actually breathe, got a grip on myself and enjoyed the rest of the performance. In the end I only remembered bits and pieces of the concert, as if I hadn't actually been there, but dreamt it.

Pretty sure I've heard those exact first 20 seconds somewhere before.

That Chanty mini-album was dope. I've heard some of their stuff before, but it wasn't until this mini that I was completely sold on them. The indie-rock VK thing they're doing is a delight. Speaking of indie-rock, I've been less impressed with this scene's output this year, but I really enjoyed Koochewsen (+ Pelican Fanclub + Kankaku Piero). お願いUFO blew my mind and ぼくのことすき was such a spacey nostalgic jam! Unfortunately, try as I might I could not get into DIV's last mini. I wish I would have liked it more and think more fondly of it, what with it being their last work and all. But ZERO ONE still reigns supreme. I could not get into that god and death stars mini either. I generally liked their stuff quite a lot, I enjoyed this too, but not quite as much as I'd hoped. I'll try giving it more listens.

What bothers me the most is how an association is being made between myself and the pejorative "Asian music freak" tag by the sheer force of the eccentricity of VK alone, to the point it completely obliterates the fact that I listen to music from all over the world and in many other languages, not just j-music and definitely not just VK. But VK is perceived as being so out there that it automatically becomes a very important aspect of my identity in the views of others i.e. my friends; even if they do know I listen to other stuff too, they choose to disregard it completely when they attempt to label my music tastes. It probably helps that they haven't really come into contact to actual j-music fanatics who wouldn't touch anything non-Japanese with a ten foot pole. I am pretty much the only example of a Japanese music listener they know and automatically assume I am the superlative in that regard. And while I learned to disregard the teasing, I can admit that it still annoys me a little. I actually had a fight with a past friend who would not stop teasing me about not being interested in going to an anime convention. I was labeled a hypocrite for trying to pretend I'm not interested when in reality I am such an Asian fanatic who most definitely likes everything Japanese and just claims not to for the sake of appearances I guess? This was pretty much the worse it ever got when it comes to skewed ideas about my listening to j-music and I do realize it's a matter of what kind of people you have in your social circle like what someone else above said. I've found that others who simply know I'm into Japanese music without knowing exactly to what extent or anything at all about VK really give no damns. It does not register to them in any way other than "uh, that's weird, but whatever you like!" . The least they know the better actually. No one actually tries to pry and find out more. And I've long stopped trying to introduce people to it. When it comes to VK, it's not just the visuals and the language that bother others, but the tone of most vocalists is also one of the biggest "offenders". I kind of like how expectations are subverted whenever I listen to something in perfectly fine English and they dig it only to find out it's Made in Japan, that was fun for a while.

Awesome first choices, these two are definitely among the albums that stood out for me as well from this year's batch. psycho:lens is kind of required listening for long lazy rainy days, contemplative or listless moods and for every Nagoya Kei fan. As for Belle, they were really not on my radar at first at all, I just kind of gave their album a listen on a whim, but it was so unexpectedly good and dare I say they concocted a sound that definitely gives them their own color in a VK scene that sometimes feels a bit too samey. It's fun apparently light pop-rock, but it's also very melancholy and I am a sucker for retro vibes in modern music. And I really love the guitar work in their music, it's something I've come to expect from them and they don't disappoint.