DogManX

Just wow. I bow my head to all the people involved, just when I thought 9gbo's CALLING couldn't get something to rival it, here comes Immortalis. Calm and refreshing sound, just as you would expect from that kind of collaboration. 9gbo, RES and Dir en grey do have some connecting points anyway. Dunno..9/10 is good I guess.
Though I don't really understand the comparisons to Dir en grey all the time (other than just another opportunity to bash the band). The only Deg-member in it is Kyo, so of course it would sound different. The main influences obviously lie in  RES and 9gbo thrown together in the mulinex. This rivalry thinking is ridiculous. This band is not Dir en grey.

TO BUY OR NOT TO BUY?
 
There are bands who have a certain formula, some which they would rather die of than change or grow out. Some bands, like infamous death/thrash metal legend Vader, remain in this formula for multiple decades, basically playing the same music over and over and still being the epitome of awesome. Some other bands like lynch. started out strong, then became more and more boring until the point of plain useless. And, well, then there is Nightmare. A band that had an undeniable charm at their early times, managing to mount the scene with badly produced demotapes already, and continuing this story of success with a relentless output of solid releases over almost a decade. There have basically been only two times of "drastic" changes of their formula, one being during the transition to a major label in 2003..and the second during their time under pop music giant avex.
 
Ever since their release of NIGHTMARE it became clear Nightmare once more would try to be "progressive", in their own perspective. Rhythm or ground tone changes within songs, the more and more excessive use of synthies and disney pop melodies. Yeah okay, they wanted to try out something new, reach a new fanbase of kids and older people as Sakito used to say. On SCUMS these kinds of elements were already becoming more prominent, on TO BE OR NOT TO BE they drove this kind of, let's just call it progression, to the maximum... and they failed miserably.
 
Let's face it. Avex did Nightmare no good. The new fashion of releasing three types of singles with two B-Sides which are, in classic Nightmare fashion, much stronger than the A-Sides, gives the impression that Nightmare are in every instant just too squeezed out at the point of actually writing album tracks. I preferred to include the B-Sides of the Scum singles into (fitting places in) the album and voila, it became so much more listenable. I really didn't repeat my mistake (calling out bad too early) on SCUMS, which I by now actually call out to be a solid release, one of which you can tell they really tried 90% of the time. I gave this new album a dozen or more listens, but..no. There is no recognition, no ambition to play any of these songs rather than any other. They didn't try a bit to make this album a good one. And what can you expect from an album that has been announced merely a month before release and was iniciated by two HORRIBLE singles? Dizzy would have been an ok song if they would have been consistent during the chorus, rewrite was just a total mess of misplaced synths, great opening riff and a totally demolished chorus. In both instances this new trend of random rhythm change and much more random ground tone switch was the main cause of disaster. And it doesn't just stop there. They literally failed in every instance, excluding the finisher L.L.B, of experimenting with this.
 
On SCUMS at least only track 2 was horrible, now the mess continues over track 3 too. Gallows is good, TO BE OR NOT TO BE tries to be an intro and a full song at the same time - horrible outcome. It doesn't sound finished, Yomi's falsetto..erm..call?.. whatever it sounds unbearably bad. 東京都羅刹区 is..just there. It's not special, and it's one of those songs ruined by a messed up chorus. The obligatory jazz song "Truth" fails right because being obligatory. There's really no reason choosing this over their past jazz songs until even Masquerade. Two boring ballads..meh. The first one "Melt into blue sky" is at least not terrible enough to skip it. Ah fuck it, let's just come to the end of the album. I feel like the last two songs (on Type B which I possess) are actually the only songs on which I feel some kind of ambition from the band. Some kind of energy. It's noise, but it's fun noise. 極上脳震煉獄・弌式 has an ice-cool main riff and heavy drums, while L.L.B provides probably the strongest Yomi performance since 5 years or so.
 
So, buy it? That is the question. Answer: No. It's not worth it. If you can, get the few songs worthy and throw out the rest altogether, it's literally SCUMS this time. Nightmare could prove though (predominantly with Gallows, 極上脳震煉獄・弌式 and L.L.B ) that deep down inside they still have it... but if there is something they're bad at, it's being progressive. So, actually TRY next time, guys. And please just stick at where you're good at.

None taken, and we know. Compared to what we have planned this is nothing and can't be stacked up against the likes of JaME or other sites.
 
So far its only two people working on the development of this, which is a lot for such a large project. Each component of the website is custom built specifically to meet our needs. This isn't just a quickly thrown up WordPress site with some pages on it.
 

 
Our focus right now is on band members. Once that's complete, we'll move on to discographies and then lyrics.
 
Those are the three elements that make up the beef of this website (bands, band members/artists, and discographies). After all three are done, we'll revisit each and spice them up with features and added information.
 
We're completely open to hearing everyone's feedback on anything and everything. It's primarily why we decided to push the website open even though there's really not much to show right now. We want the community to get involved in every aspect of the project.

So how long will it take for non-VK fans or fans interested at least equally in the music besides pictures, to consider this site? No offense, but apart from a few band pictures there's nothing really worth looking at in this.

Too complicated in japanese. Also, every smallest writer can pull off the most beautiful poems in japanese, so it gets boring really quick. If I listen to japanese lyrics, that's enough beauty for me.

So you buy the thing for half the stuff that's actually in there.. wow@consumerism
 
There are these great bands which released like 3 or 4 live DVDs in total in their carreer... just to put in some perspective. There were times where you actually craved for live recordings, precisely bc there weren't so much of them. But that's only my story to it.

Again?? Come on guys, please don't support this sellout madness. There are more useful things in life to spend money on.

@nekkichi so you're actually excited?
 
 
Yeah obviously. I also noticed that they copied a large portion of "bottom of the death valley (kisou)" for the song "bottom of the death valley (unraveling)". the 2002 version also literally sounded like mein teil (rammstein) from 2004. those f**kers, probably all on kaoru's account.

I wonder what it is about VK musicians that makes them think they can pull of harsh vox with 0 training prior. 

I've never heard harsh vocalists so underwhelming and half-assed ANYWHERE else. Even the castrated yelping vocals in your scene kid cousin's screamo band probably sound better than 99% of the shitty 'metal' vk bands floating around.

Don't even get me started on a certain melodramatic bald&bold ex-vk frontman who seems to think he can pass off mouth farting into his hand as a death growl.

Kaoru actually had a long extinct trilobite on his head. It was like the most awesome visual kei costume I've ever seen.
 
And you're not all rotten and saggy if you are 40. Sure if you spend your life staring at VK booklets your sense of reality gets distorted it seems.

I agree that there is a difference between copying and influence.

I just just think the problem in VK is that bands (and fans) are fickle and will change styles and direction at the drop of a hat to jump on whatever is trending.

There's definitely big names that set the trends and style of the VK scene and it's fine when artists take influence. That's normal across any artistic medium, whether it's music, painting, movie making etc. I just think that the relatively small size of the VK scene and talentless novice musicians that don't have an identity of their own and just playing music so they can go major and make animus theme songs.

There seems that at any given time, there's a handful of mildly talented guys that know what kind of music they want to do and they do it well and stand out and shine. But for every talented musician there's 10 or 20 fucking baddies.

To continue my crazy ranting, an example outside of VK and Japan is Folk Metal. The genre is fairly young, as in there wasn't a defined Folk Metal genre until around the 2000s. Sure there were bands in the 90s and earlier taking on folk influences but usually they weren't called folk metal and usually identified with another genre (NWOBHM, Black Metal, Power Metal etc). Ever since it's rise in popularity thanks to groups like Finntroll, Einsferium, Turisas and so forth. There's been a shit ton of awful bands that have sprung up trying to jump on the folk metal trend.

It's not unique to VK, there's plenty of retarded mouth breathing Folk Metal fans that are either just too dumb or in denial to acknowledge their unique unknown folk band is pretty awful and just recycling everything Finntroll has done already. Just way more mediocre.

And so basically I feel that's what we are seeing with VK. A genre with a few decently talented groups doing what they do well and a ton of awful groups just trying to jump on whatever cool new thing the big names are doing.
 
*edit for grammar* I am so bad at writing

I don't think Kyo would like the existence of these...
 

@DogManX
Damn I like them! That's the type of 'folk' metal I like. Basically black metal with some folky elements to it. Folk metal seems to have turned into a real gimmick these last couple of years and the only worth while bands to look into are ones that fall more into the black metal spectrum. I know I'm generalizing but seriously Eluveitie sucks.
Anyway, if you haven't tried these artists yet. Negura Bunget, Primordial, Drudkh and Windir might be to your liking.
I haven't had a chance to listen to the rest in this thread but I'll try to tonight

so what will he do on screen? acting super-cool like he always does? "hey look i'm miyavi, i'm crossing my fingers how neat is that masafruckers?" the only thing he got for acting is a face, the rest always ends up terribly embarassing when he's presenting himself to western people.
 
sry, just wanted to.. even up the vibe a bit..

I don't know who started that unnecessary hype on the Gazette, but i'd like to hurt him/her. The Gazette are bad. Yes, they are. Shitty, wrecked and without quality. As soon as the vocalist starts...ahem..singing, my intestines feel like they're imploding. Sorry for that troll rant, hating the Gazette is very unpopular, but at least i'm honest about it.

I don't know who started that unnecessary hype on the Gazette, but i'd like to hurt him/her. The Gazette are bad. Yes, they are. Shitty, wrecked and without quality. As soon as the vocalist starts...ahem..singing, my intestines feel like they're imploding. Sorry for that troll rant, hating the Gazette is very unpopular, but at least i'm honest about it.

The label that lets gazette still play and didn't disband it yet.

@Zess Sigh isn't VK
 
 
 
Sendai Kamotsu is OBVIOUSLY inspired by nightmare, which is a totally different band. Look here
 

 
watch the solo