WhirlingBlack

2017.05.05 - Polaroid image by @hyura

2017.05.05 - Polaroid image by @hyura

I've attended a show with Eiji and I didn't get any supremacist vibes from him. So I'd like to call bullshit on that. Probably just some foreign fangirl who got rejected and then decided he was a racist.

2017.05.05 - Polaroid image by @hyura

2017.05.05 - Polaroid image by @hyura

What has always struck me when it comes to Merry Go Round is how disconnected they were from the "visual" scene of it's day. And I feel like it was almost a conscious choice to keep a distance stylistically to the other bands around at the time. I've met Kazuma briefly a few times and he's a seemingly very nice (and ancient-looking) guy, but his connections to the "visual kei" scene remains fringe at best, despite participating in some sessions and things with established people in the scene he's never been a part of it properly in my opinion and his influences and interests at large seems to lay elsewhere.
 
In terms of their influence on the next generation it's the most obvious in the other "fringe" acts, bands like deadman, mucc, emmuree, munimuni, etc. owes a lot to Merry Go Round and I don't think anyone disputes that, just look at how aie rushed at the chance of forming a band with Kazuma back with highfashionparalyze like a giddy fanboy (And  for anyone who has watched KEEL live can attest that he treats Tomoi the same way, haha). If you compare it to ROUAGE for example you'd find that they did their part influencing these acts somewhat as well but carried more influence into the more "typical" visual kei of the late 90s what with the chorus style and more "melodic" touches in the darkness.
 
Anyway, great that you're shedding some light on this band again because they're easy to forget about these days and certainly easy to overlook for anyone new to the genre.
 

What has always struck me when it comes to Merry Go Round is how disconnected they were from the "visual" scene of it's day. And I feel like it was almost a conscious choice to keep a distance stylistically to the other bands around at the time. I've met Kazuma briefly a few times and he's a seemingly very nice (and ancient-looking) guy, but his connections to the "visual kei" scene remains fringe at best, despite participating in some sessions and things with established people in the scene he's never been a part of it properly in my opinion and his influences and interests at large seems to lay elsewhere.
 
In terms of their influence on the next generation it's the most obvious in the other "fringe" acts, bands like deadman, mucc, emmuree, munimuni, etc. owes a lot to Merry Go Round and I don't think anyone disputes that, just look at how aie rushed at the chance of forming a band with Kazuma back with highfashionparalyze like a giddy fanboy (And  for anyone who has watched KEEL live can attest that he treats Tomoi the same way, haha). If you compare it to ROUAGE for example you'd find that they did their part influencing these acts somewhat as well but carried more influence into the more "typical" visual kei of the late 90s what with the chorus style and more "melodic" touches in the darkness.
 
Anyway, great that you're shedding some light on this band again because they're easy to forget about these days and certainly easy to overlook for anyone new to the genre.
 

All that stuff linked above is not an option if you hate it like I do, lol.
 
Visual kei might as well have originated from two drunk Greeks twiddling around with a lyra after making love to other one's niece. I don't give a fuck. Visual kei is to a large extent my essence and being, but I would rather burn in hell for all eternity than listen to 30 seconds worth of any nu glam/sleaze cockrock, or even all their Kissy forefathers for that matter. I'd rather play 2010's The GazettE covers for a millennia in purgatory than subject myself to any of the bands linked above for a single solitary second. The guys from Bataar and Seremedy may not share my opinion to the same extent, but it's a likely scenario that they'd rather sound like VEXENT/Killaneth/GenericnuVK than OldlyCrew. Most likely these dudes grew up with mid 2000's nu metal kei as well, so whatever the gentleman from X Japan were listening to back in the day has no bearing on their lives. They're white and they want to play Vortex and Remember the urge, and that's kind of it. Wearing a Poison cumrag on your receding hairline is no less hack than rocking a 15$ emo fringe, so if they're dead set on jacking an aesthetic wholesale, then both of these options are just as socio-culturally irrelevant as the other. The concept is not the biggest factor holding them back from being up to the Japanese standard though: it's the execution. 
 
The problem here is that they're really bad and can't even do the little that they do without being embarrassingly bad, so they're forever doomed to play handout gigs at battle of the bands held in youth community centers; begging for Japanese tours from a drug-addled, rapidly aging Kenzi whom Yohio presumably blew to get his start there; or just kneel and pray for the rapid advancement of future technologies that will allow scientist to resurrect the other guy from ADAMS so they can warm up for them at their subsequent tours in the Donetsk and Luhansk republics; remaining forever unsigned, forever stuck in shitty local band limbo.
 
I try to follow these bands to the best of my ability not only out of morbid curiosity, but because if I could find 4-5 able vk fans then I'd start a weeaboo kei band myself. So while I'm sympathetic, I'm also twice as angered by their poor music, their poor taste and seemingly narrow frame of reference in visual kei, based on what I've heard and seen from ~sources~. 
 
I believe not many people have watched the original carting out the corpse of weeaboo kei video, so here's some cliffs (as far as I can remember them):
 
Back in the day there used to be a dozen vk bands in Scandinavia, now there's practically none and the ones that exist are woefully inactive. Finland used to have quite a few, although ranks of the members were very incestuous. If you can believe it, they were actually even worse than the Swedish bands and the two most long-standing ones even tried rebooting before fading into complete irrelevance. The one that I last recall having a proper concert, called "FAEK", has not updated their Facebook since Autumn of 2016. One curious aspect of the scene was also that a lot of the participants didn't really seem to be active visual kei fans, and yet despite that they used JAME to promote themselves and performed largely at cons and warming up for Satsuki/Plunklock tier bands that happened to be touring and performing at a venue called Gloria that receives some strange government money to minimise the L's the organisers take booking these shitty bands. The most longstanding band of the "scene" called "Karmia" appears to have dropped any pretensions towards vk and has settled for being a shitty local rock band. Here are the results: ( fyi the youtube superstar's former troupe that stole their name from Uverworld have also seemingly left vk behind in favor of a more western approach. Unsurprisingly their social media stature plummeted as dropping the Japanese rock shtick just unveils what they really are: one in the rank of millions of shitty local rock bands )
 
 
DIE/MAY is now the only one left and while shitcanning Seike will definitely help, they'll eventually do the routine of downshifting until turning to radio silence and then the eventual disbandment post on facebook, if they'll even bother. Aside from Tuomas and Heikki they also have afaik have one or two guys from the best Finnish vk band in HISTORY that larped TOXIC/DIVISION period The Gazette called "Desier," whom while very bad, managed to sound like an actual visual kei band on a shoestring budget and minimal ability. Conceptually they had a good thing going though. How DIE/MAY performs in their current iteration I will find out this weekend, unless I prefer trying to get cancer outside instead. Any Bataar fans sharing the hashtag can come say hi!
 
edit: This post is already a mess so it won't hurt any that I'll add something that I just thought: conceptual coherency is a problem. When I got to thinking about the last.fm's of these guys that I've seen, or the fates of Overworld and Karmia, I'm not surprised that people seemingly can't make heads or tails of what they exactly sound like. DESIER used to sound like The Gazette because afaik the composer was a huge fan, but then bands like Jenlayn and Karmia straddled a strange territory of sounding like just shitty rock music, in all its terminological ambiguity. It's not entirely farfetched that the amount of band members in the entire history of the scandinavian scene who are as vk savvy as the average member on this board, is as low as 3 or less. I actually briefly trolled a Crestillion live stream two weeks back asking what their favorite Madeth Gray'll tape was and whether they prefer Key Party or Matina. Not replying to me was a perfectly understandable response, but I have no doubt that they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about either. Visual kei in the west is being represented by Yohio ( who's old last.fm you can easily find ), and guys who literally only know Filth in the Beauty and The Final. That's tragic. 

artwork and a band pic have been revealed:
 

 

What has always struck me when it comes to Merry Go Round is how disconnected they were from the "visual" scene of it's day. And I feel like it was almost a conscious choice to keep a distance stylistically to the other bands around at the time. I've met Kazuma briefly a few times and he's a seemingly very nice (and ancient-looking) guy, but his connections to the "visual kei" scene remains fringe at best, despite participating in some sessions and things with established people in the scene he's never been a part of it properly in my opinion and his influences and interests at large seems to lay elsewhere.
 
In terms of their influence on the next generation it's the most obvious in the other "fringe" acts, bands like deadman, mucc, emmuree, munimuni, etc. owes a lot to Merry Go Round and I don't think anyone disputes that, just look at how aie rushed at the chance of forming a band with Kazuma back with highfashionparalyze like a giddy fanboy (And  for anyone who has watched KEEL live can attest that he treats Tomoi the same way, haha). If you compare it to ROUAGE for example you'd find that they did their part influencing these acts somewhat as well but carried more influence into the more "typical" visual kei of the late 90s what with the chorus style and more "melodic" touches in the darkness.
 
Anyway, great that you're shedding some light on this band again because they're easy to forget about these days and certainly easy to overlook for anyone new to the genre.
 

What has always struck me when it comes to Merry Go Round is how disconnected they were from the "visual" scene of it's day. And I feel like it was almost a conscious choice to keep a distance stylistically to the other bands around at the time. I've met Kazuma briefly a few times and he's a seemingly very nice (and ancient-looking) guy, but his connections to the "visual kei" scene remains fringe at best, despite participating in some sessions and things with established people in the scene he's never been a part of it properly in my opinion and his influences and interests at large seems to lay elsewhere.
 
In terms of their influence on the next generation it's the most obvious in the other "fringe" acts, bands like deadman, mucc, emmuree, munimuni, etc. owes a lot to Merry Go Round and I don't think anyone disputes that, just look at how aie rushed at the chance of forming a band with Kazuma back with highfashionparalyze like a giddy fanboy (And  for anyone who has watched KEEL live can attest that he treats Tomoi the same way, haha). If you compare it to ROUAGE for example you'd find that they did their part influencing these acts somewhat as well but carried more influence into the more "typical" visual kei of the late 90s what with the chorus style and more "melodic" touches in the darkness.
 
Anyway, great that you're shedding some light on this band again because they're easy to forget about these days and certainly easy to overlook for anyone new to the genre.
 

What has always struck me when it comes to Merry Go Round is how disconnected they were from the "visual" scene of it's day. And I feel like it was almost a conscious choice to keep a distance stylistically to the other bands around at the time. I've met Kazuma briefly a few times and he's a seemingly very nice (and ancient-looking) guy, but his connections to the "visual kei" scene remains fringe at best, despite participating in some sessions and things with established people in the scene he's never been a part of it properly in my opinion and his influences and interests at large seems to lay elsewhere.
 
In terms of their influence on the next generation it's the most obvious in the other "fringe" acts, bands like deadman, mucc, emmuree, munimuni, etc. owes a lot to Merry Go Round and I don't think anyone disputes that, just look at how aie rushed at the chance of forming a band with Kazuma back with highfashionparalyze like a giddy fanboy (And  for anyone who has watched KEEL live can attest that he treats Tomoi the same way, haha). If you compare it to ROUAGE for example you'd find that they did their part influencing these acts somewhat as well but carried more influence into the more "typical" visual kei of the late 90s what with the chorus style and more "melodic" touches in the darkness.
 
Anyway, great that you're shedding some light on this band again because they're easy to forget about these days and certainly easy to overlook for anyone new to the genre.
 

What has always struck me when it comes to Merry Go Round is how disconnected they were from the "visual" scene of it's day. And I feel like it was almost a conscious choice to keep a distance stylistically to the other bands around at the time. I've met Kazuma briefly a few times and he's a seemingly very nice (and ancient-looking) guy, but his connections to the "visual kei" scene remains fringe at best, despite participating in some sessions and things with established people in the scene he's never been a part of it properly in my opinion and his influences and interests at large seems to lay elsewhere.
 
In terms of their influence on the next generation it's the most obvious in the other "fringe" acts, bands like deadman, mucc, emmuree, munimuni, etc. owes a lot to Merry Go Round and I don't think anyone disputes that, just look at how aie rushed at the chance of forming a band with Kazuma back with highfashionparalyze like a giddy fanboy (And  for anyone who has watched KEEL live can attest that he treats Tomoi the same way, haha). If you compare it to ROUAGE for example you'd find that they did their part influencing these acts somewhat as well but carried more influence into the more "typical" visual kei of the late 90s what with the chorus style and more "melodic" touches in the darkness.
 
Anyway, great that you're shedding some light on this band again because they're easy to forget about these days and certainly easy to overlook for anyone new to the genre.
 

its almost like he should be taking the advice himself

You'd almost have thought it was a performance art installation, walking through the Budapest art museum while the guy next to you is consistently and completely unashamedly tinder-swiping instead of watching the paintings. Really putting in a lot of work there!

I'm really curious as to why people keep saying the band hated doing the GAUZE tour, and most likely only base it on the one performance released on DVD. As someone who attended the entire tour I can attest to the fact that it didn't lack energy at most dates. Sure, it was a bit uneven at times, but that's how this band is. Some days are bound to be better than others and I've come to terms with that many years ago. I wonder if people confuse the nature of some of the tracks which doesn't really call for a whole lot of audience interaction, or in some cases I assume, can't be afforded due to the technicality and state of practice, with boredom and dislike.
 
The truth is, they wouldn't have done the tour if the whole band truly despised doing it, so I'll just put these opinions in the pile of other tinfoil hat conspiracies like the monthly disbandment speculations (that have appeared at least for ten years if not longer by now), Kyo communicating with aliens via inward screams and various other things in descending order of crazy.
 

I'm really curious as to why people keep saying the band hated doing the GAUZE tour, and most likely only base it on the one performance released on DVD. As someone who attended the entire tour I can attest to the fact that it didn't lack energy at most dates. Sure, it was a bit uneven at times, but that's how this band is. Some days are bound to be better than others and I've come to terms with that many years ago. I wonder if people confuse the nature of some of the tracks which doesn't really call for a whole lot of audience interaction, or in some cases I assume, can't be afforded due to the technicality and state of practice, with boredom and dislike.
 
The truth is, they wouldn't have done the tour if the whole band truly despised doing it, so I'll just put these opinions in the pile of other tinfoil hat conspiracies like the monthly disbandment speculations (that have appeared at least for ten years if not longer by now), Kyo communicating with aliens via inward screams and various other things in descending order of crazy.
 

I'm really curious as to why people keep saying the band hated doing the GAUZE tour, and most likely only base it on the one performance released on DVD. As someone who attended the entire tour I can attest to the fact that it didn't lack energy at most dates. Sure, it was a bit uneven at times, but that's how this band is. Some days are bound to be better than others and I've come to terms with that many years ago. I wonder if people confuse the nature of some of the tracks which doesn't really call for a whole lot of audience interaction, or in some cases I assume, can't be afforded due to the technicality and state of practice, with boredom and dislike.
 
The truth is, they wouldn't have done the tour if the whole band truly despised doing it, so I'll just put these opinions in the pile of other tinfoil hat conspiracies like the monthly disbandment speculations (that have appeared at least for ten years if not longer by now), Kyo communicating with aliens via inward screams and various other things in descending order of crazy.
 

I'm really curious as to why people keep saying the band hated doing the GAUZE tour, and most likely only base it on the one performance released on DVD. As someone who attended the entire tour I can attest to the fact that it didn't lack energy at most dates. Sure, it was a bit uneven at times, but that's how this band is. Some days are bound to be better than others and I've come to terms with that many years ago. I wonder if people confuse the nature of some of the tracks which doesn't really call for a whole lot of audience interaction, or in some cases I assume, can't be afforded due to the technicality and state of practice, with boredom and dislike.
 
The truth is, they wouldn't have done the tour if the whole band truly despised doing it, so I'll just put these opinions in the pile of other tinfoil hat conspiracies like the monthly disbandment speculations (that have appeared at least for ten years if not longer by now), Kyo communicating with aliens via inward screams and various other things in descending order of crazy.
 

Can't they arrest someone from a shittier band instead

You'd almost have thought it was a performance art installation, walking through the Budapest art museum while the guy next to you is consistently and completely unashamedly tinder-swiping instead of watching the paintings. Really putting in a lot of work there!

You'd almost have thought it was a performance art installation, walking through the Budapest art museum while the guy next to you is consistently and completely unashamedly tinder-swiping instead of watching the paintings. Really putting in a lot of work there!

You'd almost have thought it was a performance art installation, walking through the Budapest art museum while the guy next to you is consistently and completely unashamedly tinder-swiping instead of watching the paintings. Really putting in a lot of work there!

You'd almost have thought it was a performance art installation, walking through the Budapest art museum while the guy next to you is consistently and completely unashamedly tinder-swiping instead of watching the paintings. Really putting in a lot of work there!

My man