DuelJewel - Luminous

[sai 868]

I will give a track by track review later when I have more time, but on first impression this album was pretty good. Unlike some other people, I really liked their recent singles, so I was really excited for the album. All songs are nice, Element is a little boring perhaps, but Room 1145 is incredibly epic and their remake of Akatsuki was really nice as well. There were plenty of things going on in this album. I was kind of disappointed that there were no ballads, but songs like Polaris make up for that wholy. I'd have to give it a 8/10. Why not more? Experimentation. I've seen and heard this kind of stuff from DuelJewel for a while now. They played it safe with this and I would love to see them out of their comfort zone and try something new. It will be rather difficult since all members compose for the band (so taking on a new composer ain't gonna work) but I suggest that we'll put whoever wrote Room 1145 on the songs from now on.

[dannemannen 69]

I would say that this album is the most unimpressive release of this year.

The remakes were ok, like oboritsuki, but everything else was just plain boring.

Always been a dueljewel fan but this album was just lame.

->trash bin

[nekkichi 6043]

I didn't like their recent singles, but it's probably their best album so far (and all of their LPs to date are terrible, so it's not like I'm really complimenting this particular one)

I don't like the abundance of cheap-sounding synths they've been throwing in recently - it ruined title single tracks, it sounds cheesy on fresher songs.

Didn't have much hopes for this album overall, and it came out better than I expected. Nothing was particularly bad in the first half of the album, but at the same time, nothing really stood out.

And than they "experimented" with autotune, probably to "broaden their horizons", making "sweet engage" even more terrible, like it wasn't catastrophic enough without vocoder.

I don't really like how they're sticking to the same heavy track pattern over and over, same poppish track pattern, almost same sounding effects here and there. The end results sounds so uninspired and boring, I've heard it all from them a few years ago.

I would rate it with 5,0 or something, but they tend to put an amazing song into each release too - this time it's 深淵のノクターン (Hayato sounds especially gay and weird in this track, and it ends up quite awesome, imo)

skipped most of room-1145, but I'll try to listen to this album a couple more times, not sure if I'll manage it tho. Hayato, fiercely tryharding Klaus Nomi is just... so... wrong.

6,5 for 深淵のノクターン,

They really should stick to singles and mini-albums, as visions and zero are duel jewel at its best;

their albums are either boring (lapidary and noah) or just bad (bullet, glassphia) with exceptions for 3 or 4 tracks off each 10.