saiko

I wish I could do that

The kawaii-poses makes me cringe a lot. Please bandoman, be serious,

This. VK became quickly very stereotypical in terms of visuals. What I always consider a genre sometimes makes me wonder if it isn't lack of creativity and wanting to appeal to hysterical bangya. For me, Dir is one of the few bands that always tried to put out something new each time they did a release. And, yeah, I don't get how bands like Kiryu stay that popular nowadays. They had their peak of creativity, they amazed us, and then just fell off doing the fucking same for each release...

Hey, remember when the guys totally killed it on Drag Race? Seriously, the looks from the pre-Gauze era where really draggy. I wonder what could have happened then if the 90s could have met this rising of the trans and drag topic in the mass-media.

Love him. He really supports the guys in the scene.

Me too. I guess we should organize ourselves and send a Japanese-skilled person to ask for us on the Japanese boards...

The very hard reality of this scene since its beggining...

The preview kinda bored me, but the whole song looks amazing! I've never thought Dir will do a Luna Sea-esque song again since Yurameki... Also the visuals are savage. Cool return to the roots😍

This is something I've been thinking since I realized I loved vk more than any other music scene. I'd love to discuss it in another thread. It's really sad to get confirmed with facts and within the opinion of the community what every "normal" person with "normal" music tastes around you said when you came to discover it and fell in love... The negative appreciation on vk being a bunch of crazy people doing shitty music seems transcultural at this point...

Love this testimony! Would love to hear more... Shinya was always my favorite member, followed by Toshiya. The two of them are actually the most skilled ones you the band.

Gosh, I love it. This is the kind of look they deserve... May the Adidas crazyness be kept in their cringe-vault, along with their 1998 Budokan performance, and NEVER try to come back... Dir will be always vk, no matter what they say... Oh, and that's a VK feature magazine. Interesting move. I can remember when they stopped to circulate into those magazines when they started their MOAB era...

I feel some kind of weird when I realize the many awesome songs penned by Kyo (or Ruki, also) that are clearly anti-abortion hymns... Then I remember that Japan is far, very far indeed from lightening their heads with a little of genre conscience... Well, I just try to avoid thast thoughts lol

Wow, Dir has finally gone vk all the way! This even sounds almost like a Luna Sea ballad, like someone above said.

Very cringe-worthy indeed.

As the title says, I'm interested in recruiting members for: 1) compiling available tabs of vk music in the web; 2) correcting them if they have mistakes; 3) transcribing published official "band scores" using interactive virtual score plataforms (like GuitarPro); 4) looking up for the said scores scans on the Web or buy them; 4) transcribing by ear songs that doesn't have an official "band score" release in Japan; 5) finally making up a single and exhaustive archive for the tabs. Anyone interested?

At some point it's just just a matter of persons trying to obtain acknowledging of others for the things they love. Also, consider that this is a central issue specially within teenage years (I'm sure 90% of the fanbase we are taking about are teenage and young adults), a period of life where happens a deep reconstruction of oneself's identity. Yet vk is far from being a mainstream scene, so the amount of said acknowledging you can take from being enthusiastic about it is perhaps null. And also you really can't wait from them to understand, for example, the recalling aspects of same bands with, for example, Kuroyume. In my own experience, it took me almost ten years and a deep understanding of musical theory to actually come to realize the specific criteria and values of the scene in terms of music, lyrics and performance, and the system of genealogy relations between certain artists, and so on. But before then... I must say I was a rabid 2009 AN Cafe fan lol

Any more info on this revival?

I'm very happy reading this. First, Disposable is actually acknowledging that there certainly IS a particular sound for visual kei (And that is a hard thing to realize, considering the fact that no matter how the majority of the fanbase try to simply deny its existence, or else try to "explain" it reducing itself to nonsensical and very vast categories like "Japanese goth" or even "Japanese metal", or ways like that). Second, he also gives a special place to this kind of sound into Dir's arrangement genealogy till today. Happy.

Beautiful

Wow, this dudes still keeping on touring? I really love Dear song and Notice from the.! Love this kind of primitive vk sound that had the post-punk influence in their sound almost untouched...

More info, please!

Over the time I came to really think that it is not like they actually hate it, or the whole vk-era, for instance. That is easily plausible since the DSS and Arche-era tours, when they started to recover not only their theatrical and outrageous fashion, but also some of their most vk-rooted classics (like Aoi tsuki, or the classic version of Byoushin; my head almost exploded when I noticed they played the first in one of their Budokan performances). So, rather than wanting it to "dissapear" (following what Kyo repeated in many of their first foreign interviews, when they were asked for the filliation with the term "visual-kei", once the West came to discover) I think they were actually creating what they considered a healthy distance with the vk scene concept when they started touring abroad. In fact, many of the bands that folowed that pioneering-trend back in 2007 (like Mucc, D'espairs) also understood that they needed to tone-down their image in order to get more appealing to the scenes they thought they could fit in in the West (the punk and metal scenes). IMHO they were, and still can be considered, a "visual-kei" band in many ways, no matter how far the sound of "Ningen wo kaburu" can appear to be that distant from "Garden". That, and Kyo being a fucking borderline guy.

Sadly true. But fuck them, Garden is awesome. They really made up something very genuine with one of the most cliché formula of the 90s scene.

Did Dir actually sent a sake bottle with a a deluxe edition of something? lol

This are the examples that force us to reconsider what's the meaning of vk nowadays... This kind of idolized-bands, produced strictly to deliver fangirl fantasies, makes my head explode in cringe... I guess we won't be getting any genuine band in the scene ever again... I wish I lived in Japan in the 90s lol