REALies - Drama

[Zeus 7997]

Artist: REALies Album: Drama Score: Deep breaths Zess. Deep breaths.

Before I begin, I'm going to invent a new term called musical dysmorphia. I will use this term throughout the review to describe a glaring flaw with this album. Musical dysmorphia is when a song awkwardly and unevenly moves between multiple genres with reckless abandon. It is the result of a composer stitching together compositions from entirely different genres to form The Musical Centipede. Do not mistake this for being diverse and do not think that this is a good thing. This is a very annoying thing to have to endure.

Fortunately, the listener will not be subjected to it for the first half of the album. As a matter of fact, the album was enjoyable up until 久遠-kuon-, which I found to be a tepid but unoffensive pop-rock track. I enjoyed the heavy bass presence on NEVERLAND (but I could do without the modulated screams here and there) and the entirety of セツナキャンドル and gossip, which I would call the best tracks on the album. In fact, I would dare to call NEVERLAND and セツナキャンドル good-to-excellent songs if REALies didn't resort to a contrived pop chorus to hook those pieces together. For the first half of Drama, I got something better than I expected from REALies, which is a solid pop-rock album with a few flaws. These flaws are the occasional flatness of Rayka's vocals, the occasional cheesy chorus, and an over-reliance on synthesized instruments to carry the bulk of the melody. The last point is the biggest flaw of them all. The production overall is really good for a visual kei band, being crisp and clean while still balancing everything in the mix. This is notable because there is a lot of electronics buzzing about in every track and for the first half of the album they don't overpower the band too much. But such great production reveals the artificiality of these instruments. There are violin swells, piano runs, and shamisen twangs that would have been REALized better if the instruments were authentic. Luckily, most of these fake instruments are relegated to flourishes only.

A critical downfall of Drama (and the reason for the low score) is the second half. Musical dysmorphia stops the album dead in it's tracks and spends the next five tracks in a rut it can't escape from. The first half of the album does diversity right, smoothly moving between rhythmic and tonal changes to good effect. There is thought and care put into the first five songs that is missing from the next five. Instead of smooth transitions, REALies resorts to interlude abuse to bring together parts of songs that have no business being together. We have dubstep portions, a trance intro, an exceptionally bad shamisen snippet, random breakdowns, and the occasional half-assed rap portion courtesy of Rayka. They're all broken off into their own sections and follow each other with not even so much as the backwards woosh-ing sound that Nega used to stitch their disjointed songs together. So let's explore this part of the album now.

彩花唄-いろはうた- starts the decline of Drama. It all starts with the inclusion of the shamisen I keep mentioning that doesn't sound quite right. At first you think the track is going to have it's own distinctive flavor but its inclusion sounds like an interlude and not a legit element of the song. The rest of the song is more pop with two interludes where it pops up again and again to be the ultimate tease. If it were an actual pop song played with traditional Japanese instruments it would have been excellent but it seems that REALies weren't brave enough to take that jump. However, this is just disappointment at the track. This disappointment was magnified by the following track. The piano is too loud, the guitars are heavy but the riffs don't hold up to the dynamic ones from earlier, and the growling is just bad. The chorus assassinates the track, being another cookie cutter rendition complete with off-key vocal ticks. It's then followed up by the worst track on the entire album.

180 is the perfect example of musical dysmorphia at work. It's three minutes flat but starts off with a trance intro before being pummelled with the loudest mishmash of riffs and synth on the album. Heavy riffs and terrible growls are abundant so I reasonably expected another cliche "heavy" song. Then it starts shitting all over itself around 0:53 as the hype train slowly ascends into pop territory and the song fools you into thinking it's going to turn out decent. To be honest, there was a period of about ten seconds where I thought this would actually happen. Then I thought that the track has to level out. It doesn't. Around 1:53 the train decided it wanted to be a plane and then shot off into orbit with another, more upbeat electronic interlude before jumping into a faster-paced rock section. And just when you think you've heard everything, there's a lynch.-like breakdown near the end there for no reason other than the gang didn't know how to end the song. Each section lasts for about twenty to twenty-five seconds and that's not enough time for any part of it to develop and the song sounds too disjointed to work. My repetition of the word disjointed is intentional. I wouldn't blame you if you did a 180 on the album right now.

The next two tracks are no better. LiNE combines all of the elements I don't like into one song. There's more terrible harsh vocals, a dubsteppy breakdown later, a four second excursion into the post-hardcore scene, and then a jump right back into a poppy chorus. It works about as well as I've described it. The track following it is completely forgettable and I have nothing to say about it. Things don't shape up until the last track, Drama, which is a half-ballad half-pop song with more fake violins. It's a pretty boring end to an otherwise lackluster album, but it's consistency and flow which was missing from the last five tracks makes it a decent album closer.

So I was surprised and then summarily disappointed. I was expecting an entire album of really bland pop with terrible vocals. What I got were some promising tunes, one or two songs I admit I liked, and then a shitshow to prove my fears right. There are a lot of positives here to talk about, more than I was initially going to give to the band, but Drama would have been much better off being a mini-album. There are too many bad tracks one after another to call this even a mediocre album. REALies needs to reign in the influences and compose more tunes like the first five songs and less like the last five songs. I also never want to hear another band do anything resembling 180.

This is really only an album for prior REALies fans. The rest can live with hearing gossip once on plug.dj.