enyx

I'm surprised that 2009 was the peak. It was already around that time I was complainin' how there's no good shows to attend lol. With that said, those shows that we did have sold very well and a few bands could even venture to have gigs in the second largest city of the country as well. 
I reckon the pop culture peak of visual kei in Finland was in 2007-2008 when the odd few bands made the telly and got gifted some magazine space. Shows were packed, the fashion was wild, no koreans gnawing in on the real estate, events that were associated with visual kei could actually be held at relatively low risk.
 
 
What's up for debate though, is how the new fanbase of the peak years wasn't able to recover from the crucial wave of hiatus', disbandments and stylistic changes that the most popular bands went through around the turn of the 2010's. Everyone should recall how often one heard people lamenting on the state of the scene with ambiguous claims of a lack of X, Y and Z, setting the scene for the gradual petering out either to the clutches of the koreans or just general normalcy. This is the way of the flesh for a fad certainly, and nobody is able to sustain creative output nor popularity for an extended period of time, but that's not all that there is to it. I suppose among great many other things, it's not unjust to consider public merely as fickle if their visual kei habit was dependent on the existence of Dio and Unsraw. Visual kei on the internet had good enough infrastructure to allow these people to discover new and old bands with relative ease, but one should still never underestimate the stupidity and the incapability of the rank and file to utilize such tools perfectly well in their disposal. There are still people who'll waltz into a conversation, feigning willful ignorance, saying "OH THESE BANDS OF TODAY AREN'T LIKE THE GIRUGAMESH OF YORE. SO WHAT HAPPENED WITH THAT VISUAL KEI?". This means that relative interest is there; they haven't forgotten about it, so what gives? 
 
A certain contributing factor that I don't think gets brought up enough is the bush league organising and the sheer ineptitude of the promoters. The fad really blew its wad during the two years it was at its peak, and it wasn't sustainable. Absurdly dumb, dead certainly set for failure, shows got booked even as late as 2015: and anyone with a lick of sense ought to know that in the long term a no-show is always better than a small-shit show. When you're flopping the proper course of action is never to keep on flopping until you can flop no more, but to change the approach. Rest assured a lot of money and contacts have been squandered by idiots already one foot out the door. Unsraw's European tour is a classic example, and Merry's a more recent one. If you're not able to project that there's no demand, and that by booking this there'll be no demand in the future, then you're simply not helping.  
 
The networking on the local level wasn't great and at its worst there were even open divisions between the fanbase of privileged rich blogger cunts and those who took the train to shows from their shit provincial towns who could barely afford the mcdonald's and second hand converse ( I confess my dislike of the former, but I'm not merely projecting it. I heard many other people voice it also, completely unprovoked by yours truly. ) When enough shows and events are abjectly booked to fail with a lack of camaraderie to match, the rot is aggravated to spread into the brain, and eventually even the life support in form of a Gazette european tour won't do you no good. Their 2016 show in Helsinki did not sell out. That's equal to the sky falling out in visual kei terms.
 
A curious example of grassroots level organising seemingly done correct: take a look at the pictures of SANA's recent solo tour from from the backarse of eastern europe. Going through all those pictures you'll notice that while the central and western European crowds are only a handful at best, the Russian and Ukrainian shows pull a kind of a crowd that man of SANA's stature has no right of pulling. I'm terribly interested to find out how they've managed to do this. The only reason I can manage to come up with by speculation alone is that the fans of "Japanese stuff" are so organised, if not rabid, that when something is organised, enough effort is done that it'll pull enough solidarity to maintain the scene's health. I swear to God one of those Sana crowds has equal heads to what EAT YOU ALIVE or heidi had here in the past three years. It can't be that there's more fans of this shit there than in here just by sheer chance, luck and coincidence. 

The parallels between the decline of VK and the undoing of the global J-indie scene are almost scary. By 2009, the fandom had already gone into recession and has since only snowballed into oblivion. Granted, the J-indie world has never had the viral reaches of VK, but what little we did have is all but a snapshot in the web archives now. There have been a few sparks here and there, but it's never been enough to ignite that oh-so necessary communal flame. Thankfully, the VK community has had MH here as a pillar of sorts, while the feeble structures of the J-indie scene mostly lie in ruins with too few enthusiasts around to help excavate.
 
I could point towards a few things that I think lent a hand to the global J-indie scene's decline from within, but given the almost parallel time-line between it and the global VK scene, it does make me wonder what external factors might have affected both international scenes (in addition to the points some of you have already mentioned!)

Most people in japan use Yahoo, but I don't think Yahoo has a similar trends analysis tool to google. Hence I searched in Japanese, and Japan was the only region available so I didn't have to narrow it down further:
 
Blue: "visual kei" / Region: global
Red: "ヴィジュアル系" / Region: Japan

 
Also communities and individuals migrating from livejournal to tumblr might've been a factor as well. It created a mess at the time and information sources became convoluted.

Noticed something interesting when I was exploring worldwide trends for the search term "visual kei" on google - that tiny spike earlier this year just happened to be when youtubers react to visual kei came out:

 
So visual kei is dead. And at the rate it is going now, will be even dead-er; A scene stagnating on the same looks and sounds, rarely venturing out musically if at all. But it wasn't always that way. Although it would be  appropriate to refer to the 90s golden era of vk to remind us of how opulent the scene once was, I want to bring back memories of 2009.
 
In October 2008, Kerrang ran a feature on jrock, publishing an article predicting jrock to go big in Europe in 2009.
And sure enough, google trends highlighted the correlation clearly, confirming that the search terms "j-rock" and "visual kei" did indeed peak between January and March 2009.
 
However, following vk's brief global success was a period of near-exponential decline - to what we see now as the lowest point of popularity vk has ever experienced in a 12 year time-span. Even that spike in August wasn't enough to break above 2004's lowest point.
 
Personally, I'd been a passive fan of visual kei for many years prior to 2009, but it wasn't until 2009 that I became fully engaged. One prominent catalyst was Japanese blogging platform Ameba launching its virtual community ‘Pigg’ that year, becoming a game changer in the way fans and bands could interact. Popular musicians were also given accounts powered by ameba, a la twitter's verified personalities.
 
I remember 2009 as a year that several vk bands were going major and gaining international recognition. It was no surprise that vk reached its global height by being much more accessible through social media and other digital channels. This momentum seemed to be gaining quickly until 2010 brought a sharp turn of unfortunate events within the scene and the emergence of kpop poached a large part of the international vk audience.
 
However, the situation in Japan is a bit different, as vk has been pretty steady since it had already declined by the turn of the century. The search term "ヴィジュアル系" on google trends says as much.
 
A few years ago, major labels published all those visual kei cover albums probably in an attempt to raise the relevance of visual kei, but the hype had pretty much died by then. The drought of talent and variety meant that each band was no better than the other, and was enough for many people to lose interest. Stricter piracy laws also meant that music had become less accessible, with people being reluctant to pay the exorbitant prices of some CDs. Not to mention the discontinuation of many vk magazines as an indication of the scene's current degradation. Marketing and business models that worked in the 90s and early 00s struggle to find significance in the present day, yet management has not evolved to adapt to current trends (or have done so poorly).
 
Now that the last of the influential underground vk labels is defunct, vk doesn't have the backing and budget as it once did. X Japan and Luna Sea are like the only lifeline left for vk - there can't even be a vk festival without either X Japan or Luna Sea in the lineup.
 
I remember reading an interview where Yohio mentioned that he kinda killed western interest in vk, but I don't particularly attribute that to those western vk acts damaging the reputation of this uniquely japanese scene. Bands such as D'espairsRay, girugamesh, the Underneath, Rentrer en Soi, Dio, UnsraW and Black:List etc who laid the groundwork for vk to make its mark in the west are no longer around. I'm surprised lynch. didn't carry the torch.
 
I don't want this thread to sound too much like #resurrectvk, but instead I want ignite a discussion (and maybe create a dialog) - how did the vk boom of '09 affect you in your country, what could've been done differently, or the best things to come out of  that little modern renaissance of vk history.
 
 

Full article here:
 
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2016/12/25/music/best-japanese-indie-2016

Kaoru's been pretty open about his love for downy for a few years now, so him being involved with this doesn't necessarily surprise me even though I'll admit I wasn't exactly expecting it. SUGIZO can be really cool when he gets his creative cap on, so it's nice that he's involved in some capacity too; I wonder if his involvement means that there's going to be a prominent violin component in there somewhere? Don't know anything about Morrie so I can't really comment on his involvement.

Sometimes when I see thread titles on here I really want to say them out loud to someone who doesn't know anything about Japanese music without any context just to see what their reaction would be.

Sometimes when I see thread titles on here I really want to say them out loud to someone who doesn't know anything about Japanese music without any context just to see what their reaction would be.

Sometimes when I see thread titles on here I really want to say them out loud to someone who doesn't know anything about Japanese music without any context just to see what their reaction would be.

Sometimes when I see thread titles on here I really want to say them out loud to someone who doesn't know anything about Japanese music without any context just to see what their reaction would be.

WHAT

Day 24: siraph by siraph 

 
Release Date: 2016-05-18
Label: NBC Universal Entertainment Japan 
Genre: Pop Rock/Electronic
 
 
Impressions from @Zeus:
 
 
Impressions from @CAT5:
 
 
Impressions from @Original Saku:
 
 
Impressions from @Ito:
 
Sample song:
 
Buy the album:
Amazon

I'm sure everybody can already guess that I fundamentally disagree with this album being placed so highly on this list, and that I believe it's an abomination that nobody should ever listen to /s
 
On a serious note, the album is just as good as their 2013 behemoth, and I consider that one to be one of the best albums ever released. Maybe I'm just a hopeless fanboy, but this band can seemingly do no wrong.

Agreed 100%! Especially the part about shuffle. I almost feel like that for each track on  the album, you can find an earlier counterpart where THE NOVEMBERS did it better lol. Why choose fast food when you can have gourmet? 
 
And downy making the list? Amen. Those guys are brilliant! <3

I actually found Hallelujah a little disappointing, personally. I'd argue that it's their weakest post-2011 release largely on account of the fact that they didn't really take any risks at all throughout the entire album; the whole thing feels decidedly 'safe' from start to finish. That doesn't mean it's 'bad' exactly, it just doesn't push their creative boundaries at all - which is what every release they've put out for the last 5 or so years has done in some way or another. As a result some of the tracks feel rather like filler or leftovers from previous albums, such as 時間さえも年老いて, !!!!!!!!!!!, etc. Even its high points, while enjoyable, do come with that 'more of the same' sort of feeling, so I've noticed I only really end up listening to most of the tracks on this album when they come up in a random shuffle as opposed to deliberately seeking them out. I'm hoping their next release sees them going back to a more experimental mindset.

I actually found Hallelujah a little disappointing, personally. I'd argue that it's their weakest post-2011 release largely on account of the fact that they didn't really take any risks at all throughout the entire album; the whole thing feels decidedly 'safe' from start to finish. That doesn't mean it's 'bad' exactly, it just doesn't push their creative boundaries at all - which is what every release they've put out for the last 5 or so years has done in some way or another. As a result some of the tracks feel rather like filler or leftovers from previous albums, such as 時間さえも年老いて, !!!!!!!!!!!, etc. Even its high points, while enjoyable, do come with that 'more of the same' sort of feeling, so I've noticed I only really end up listening to most of the tracks on this album when they come up in a random shuffle as opposed to deliberately seeking them out. I'm hoping their next release sees them going back to a more experimental mindset.

Cool kids take photos in black and white these days, right?

 
Plus a bonus from when I straightened my hair

We all know that VK bands breed releases like rabbits, so I've been trying to gauge out which bands are the worst serial offenders in coming out with new material and did some number crunching on some of the bands with the most extensive discographies (excluding remixes, remasters, karaoke/instrumental and re-recordings)
 
So far I haven't been able to find a band that even comes close to being as prolific as mejibray with so much material in such short time, not even ains bands.
 
Except maybe Grieva.
 
MEJIBRAY
years: 5.5 years
unique songs: ≳102
time it takes to listen: 6.7 hours
productivity rate: 19 songs per year - almost 2 full albums every year. seriously how
 
GRIEVA
years: 4.5 years
unique songs: ≳76-86 (too many SEs)
time it takes to listen: 4.7 hours
productivity rate: 18 songs per year
 
DIAURA
years: 6 years
unique songs: ≳97
time it takes to listen: 6.5 hours
productivity rate: 16 songs per year / 1 album + single per year / 1 EP every 4 months
 
Lycaon
years: 7.5 years
unique songs: ≳100
time it takes to listen: 5.8 hours
productivity rate: 13 songs / 1 album per year
 
KIRYU
years: 9 years
unique songs: ≳113
time it takes to listen: 7.3 hours
productivity rate: 12 songs / 1 album per year
 
DEZERT
years: 5 years
unique songs: ≳60
time it takes to listen: 3.5 hours
productivity rate: 12 songs / 1 album per year
 
girugamesh
years: 12
unique songs: ≳130
time it takes to listen: 7.8 hours
productivity rate: 11 songs / 1 album per year
 
AWOI
years: 9.5 years
unique songs: ≳85
time it takes to listen: 5.7 hours
productivity rate: 9 songs / 1 album + 1 EP every alternating year
 
list is short because filtering out duplicates is hard.
 
It would also be interesting to see how well some of the longer-tenured bands do on this list.

is the vk landscape truly so barren this year that we have to resort to putting greatest hits albums on our end of year lists? ;^)

I'll be in plug in about 2 hours for anyone who's down!
 
plug.dj/monochrome-heaven

and when they disband, they do mysteriously.

New teaser:
 
 

New teaser:
 
 

New teaser: