Truly crappy Western "visual kei" inspired music

[MaikoMizu 167]

Seeing those videos and reading a majority of these comments made me want to leave the internet forever. 
I had no idea until today that people partook in VK outside of Japan. It's pretty creepy actually. I mainly thought if you were in Japan and had decent vocals and found a few friends to start a band, anyone could join a decent label and become VK. 
Get a few outfits and flashy parts, latex pants, dresses. 

[lichtlune 915]

you should be embarrassed hagan, you just can't see why because you love yourself too much

Great assumption. I love myself too much huh? Where did you pull that one out from eh? I actually have a lot of self image problems and had all kinds of shit thrown out at me for things I did in the past involving music. It made me feel like complete shit but I continued on. I'd love to know where exactly you got this idea about me from. 

 

I would also like to know why you're using my real name on here. Obviously I wish to be known as "Neolicht" on this forum. I even deleted my real name from most places on the internet. You must be stalking me or something I guess.

[Ro plz 1290]

What

in

the

actual

fuck.....

I wasn't a big fan of OVERWORLD but to leave that somewhat decent sounding band to do this?

BRUH.

[DogManX 179]

In the west, there's this sort of image that you have to be gay and part of some transsexual / dragqueen culture to do VK. It's just lame and predictable. I hate dragqueens. They're ugly and creepy.

[Takadanobabaalien 3607]

Yeah, guess that just proves how much part in Overworld Endigo was, lol. 

[Vitne Eveille 65]

I agree with those of you who said western VK bands singing in Japanese is awkward.  It totally is.  However, what they could do is do an original version in English, and then also do one in Japanese.  Example:  Gackt has released a few songs in Japanese with versions in Mandarin, Korean, etc.

 

I guess where some of them are coming from is just inverting the Japanese style of singing in mostly Japanese and throwing in some random English phrases and words here and there.  But the thing with this is that this has been prevalent in Japanese language for many years.  It's not normal for English media to throw in Japanese words, lol.

 

In terms of western VK bands, I've only recently heard of BatAAr, so I don't know anything about them.  I know of Yohio, Seremedy, Crestillion, Jet Set Gypsies.  

 

Here are my thoughts:

 

Jet Set Gypsies:  When I first saw them a few years ago, I thought their image was strange.  However, when they released their music video "Tourniquet" their costumes looked pretty awesome.  That was a huge step I'd say.  I think they've got a lot of potential, and I kinda know Vincent (Prince V), and he's a great guy.

 

Yohio:  I like him and I like some of his music, but he's a bit too girly (in image) at the moment for me.  And stemming from Seremedy, I've never really liked the whole lolita thing in VK bands.  I just think it's kinda lame.  And I also think Yohio could stand to put on a few pounds now  I think his full-length album...the mixing sounded off to me.  Heartbreak Hotel sounded great though.

 

Seremedy:  Screamo-emo-"vk".  When I first heard that band I thought "ugh, so this is western VK?  No thanks" lol

 

Crestillion:  Their image.............But it's improving.  Petri (lead singer) is getting better, and the music is pretty high quality.  But their name makes me think of toothpaste.  Most of their songs sound like they should be in a Sonic Adventure game (not a bad thing, but I'd like to hear some more variety), and Petri's dancing is really awkward   But they're doing their thing and standing by it, and I respect that.

[paradoxal 2948]

2 hours ago, Vitne Eveille said:

I agree with those of you who said western VK bands singing in Japanese is awkward.  It totally is.  However, what they could do is do an original version in English, and then also do one in Japanese.  Example:  Gackt has released a few songs in Japanese with versions in Mandarin, Korean, etc.

--- 

 

Check out DiVOID and you might be surprised! Personally I think they were amazing, such a shame that they disbanded already.

[Pretsy 1343]

What about Salem's Lott (have they been mentioned already?)?

 

Some true glam/X Japanesque crossover shit right here

 

 

[Jigsaw9 6783]

^ Excuse you, they are not crappy. ;(

[orange~ 387]

I don't think Salems Lott is really VK. that's full on glam metal (or sleaze metal/hair metal/glam rock/whatever you wanna call it). Then again I feel like early VK was just continuation of glam/hair metal so it's hard to say where the line goes. In any case those guys are pretty cool.

[Bear 1817]

I disagree with Salems Lott being a full on glam metal band. And the reason is simple: they play a type of music that doesn't fall in under that term. There's elements of the traditional glam metal sound in their music here and there, but they fall a lot closer to the heavy/speed/power metal of bands such as X Japan, Aion, Harkenkreuz and Rosenfeld, and of course bands such as Accept, Loudness and more. You gotta remember that glam is about more than just having big hair and flashy clothes. To be a glam band you also gotta play a type of music that fits in with the genre, and Salems Lott simply isn't doing that.

 

Visualy I also think they look more like X Japan, Rosenfeld, Harkenkreuz and so on, than any traditional glam bands IMO.

[orange~ 387]

Glam movement itself is pretty broad as far as music genres go, and depending on who you ask, it can be just about the aesthetics. I've heard metalcore, speed/trash metal, punk, electronic stuff from bands I consider part of this sleaze/glam movement. Then there are elitists of course who say only 70's stuff has the right to be called glam-anything and everything after that is just heavy metal/whatever. In very much the same way as VK can be for some people just aesthetics, glam too can be. For me, I consider even stuff like Marilyn Manson continuation of glam.

 

okay you know what, I write stuff, then rewrite it, trying to make some point which even I don't know what. in the end I gotta agree lol. Both visuals and sound of Salem's Lott are closer to VK origins, X-Japan and such, so ya ^^

Edited May 26, 2016 by orange~

[zaa_zaa 208]

Another Russian (already disbanded) old-school visual-kei band.

Frankly, they put up a couple of good songs and their guitarists did an awesome job sounding like a typical 90s visual-kei band (I can clearly hear Deshabillz and Neil influences), but the vocals... And mixing Russian with English sounds so pathetic.
Well, they tried.

Edited August 18, 2017 by zaa_zaa

[zaa_zaa 208]

Hungary, I believe.

They even toured in Japan, and I have to respect that, good job. It is this rare case when visual kei inspired band managed to make it that far. But then I wouldn't be surprised if the reason why they had these gigs was because they themselves happened to be in Japan at that time, and managed to land these gigs themselves.

 

The voice makes my ears bleed, drum-machine is insanely horrible (c'mon, write drums in Guitar Pro, import it into FL, apply EZ drummer or any other plug in, and you have something much better than this crap) and guitars are...
 

One of these cases when even if it were a Japanese band, I wouldn't have given it a chance.

 

As one of my professional musician friends pointed out - even at shitty anime festivals that she ever attended all cover-bands sounded better, lol.

Edited August 28, 2017 by zaa_zaa

[Zalemu 236]

 

I've been following the vocalist of this (Swedish?) band on Instagram for a while. Finally decided to google their music and... yikes.

[sleepy coffee 1476]

idk if this is the right place for this but just remembered about these guys, who are technically all japanese but started up in los angeles. well anyways also stumbled across the current/newish youtube channel the vocalist has here

https://www.youtube.com/user/koron0106

the content has nothing to do with vk or music but i mean i guess if you remember these guys at all then this fact could be interesting 

[Gaz 1097]

LuCiD was legit bijuaru shit tbh

[Karma’s Hat 3107]

Recently I've been wondering about the seemingly gigantic social media following of certain Swedish visual kei personalities, and how little traffic they actually do get despite of it. 

 

Case and point: The Weebkei King Yohimbe has been on a massive release and promotion campaign for his record label. Having previously been in the habit of starting something and abandoning it only moments later, he's now been on this kick for more than a few months, even putting out new stuff by DISREIGN, English DISREIGN, some gaijin chump who nobody listens to and sings with a really hokey put-on gravely voice called Mitsugi and then his solo stuff. He still hasn't gotten rid of all his old habits tho, since he has in the meantime stopped doing both his podcast and daily vlogs, and is extremely unproductive on Patreon for his astonishingly perseverant 21 patrons. All of this hasn't made him get any bigger numbers than before, and I think we all know that he has hit the ceiling with his flop career a long time ago. That's not what I'm trying to get at though.

 

When he puts out a PV it goes into 100k's of views in relatively short order, but when he puts out anything else it literally makes no numbers whatsoever. He put out a new song two days ago and it ended up auto-generated on Youtube under his channel name, and in two days it has gotten only 2.7k views. What about the tweet with the preview of the track? 374 likes. Somehow while my boy is more active than he has ever been, he only does huge numbers for a selected handful of songs with PVs just like he always has, his twitter numbers continue to trend downwards and the spike he got for his Youtube channel subscribers a long while back is highly suspicious to say the least. Even the attention that he appears to get for his PVs doesn't translate to anything else, because his label and projects that are in it are languishing in obscurity. How does that work? I know Nocturnal Serenade was promoted by the Youtube algorithm, but surely not all his PVs can be that lucky, unless he has come up with a way to really game the system. How does this shit work

 

 

[nekkichi 6043]

1 hour ago, Disposable said:

How does that work?

his social media manager buys views and likes in bulk to show numbers to his label execs who don't follow his twitter (which probably isn't mentioned anywhere too.)

 

if his IG has following and like count numbers they're probably buying it too.

[saiko 429]

It's kind of a sinister feeling one gets while watching the ridiculous scenario of a pack of "users" actively giving a stuff you know it's ridiculous, nonsensical, inconsistent, etc. a lot of attention all of a sudden... feels like one's gone crazy or something...

 

But buying social media 'credits' (likes, views, subscriptions, downloads, etc.) these days is SO much common than what oneself could ever imagine.  And I don't think it would stop any day, considering we are moving forward a virtual society more and more each day.

Edited May 24, 2020 by saiko

[Karma’s Hat 3107]

Yeah I also think there's a good chance he has bought at least a good portion of those views. I just find strange that he doesn't apply the same philosophy to the rest of his content. The Mitsugi guy struggles to get 200 views even, and half of the comments are yohio commenting under the Yohio account, Keios entertainment account, Rehn music group account and others. 

 

Anyway I find him very fascinating and endlessly entertaining. He was really unproductive around 2018 and early 2019 and seemed to have been in depression around that time according to twitter, only to self-help himself back to shape for the latter half of 2019 when he started his big campaign to get KEIOS finally going after numerous false starts the 8 odd years prior. On the website they have purged the labels real history, like his girl group, Mitsugi Senior Oskar Bruzell or something like that who appears to have become a member of the Swedish liberal right wing party since; and speaking of right wing, the Ex-Yohio drummer who was also the drummer for Marduk was caught ordering nazi merch with Arioch/Mortuus lmao. So Yohio the band is actually, according to the logic of guilty by association, tied to the far right. 

 

I'm going to hedge my bets on him continuing almost until the end 2020 before he gives up and becomes inactive again, but I wouldn't put it past him to give up by mid autumn either I imo the Keios resurgence is already losing stream. If they're paying for views then the majority of their income has to come from being featured on Melodifestivalen playlists on spotify, and that can't be a whole lot of money in 2020. 

 

[Kirito 69]

Even if I don't always like his songs, i have to admit his productivity is very impressive.

 

I understand he works 100 % of the time for his label but yeah , how can he gets enough income to be able to focus only on music like that

Edited May 25, 2020 by Kirito

[ghostpepper 158]

With Yohio it always interesting to see the gap between internet fame vs real life value in the scene. While net promotion is important For VK you really have to put in the work of being in the events, not just feeding your ego and image online. 

 

Besides just yohio, for lots of the fellow foreign vk guys who eventually make it over here, they are satisfied with doing only a few events, often even not in visual kei events/vk based livehouses but at rock or loud-kei events and feel they've really accomplished something instead of realizing theyve wasted time and money. But even if you are playing those VK events you really need to constantly be in the scene or it means little on the indies level. 

[Kirito 69]

And you don't think it's possible some bands are just having fun making music... ? I mean, nowadays it's very crazy to think your gonna make a living with your band. It's possible, but you cannot do music for this reason.

Edited May 25, 2020 by Kirito

[ghostpepper 158]

39 minutes ago, Kirito said:

And you don't think it's possible some bands are just having fun making music... ? I mean, nowadays it's very crazy to think your gonna make a living with your band. It's possible, but you cannot do music for this reason.

 

Of course that is important. I always offer any help I can to fellow musicians as I know the struggle. but as doing music cost money, Even if you are doing it only as a hobby, it is always important to think about the return you get for your efforts.