Worst To First: Dir en grey

[psychonnect_rozen 585]

5 minutes ago, Ro plz said:

Kisou is terrible studio album but the MODE OF Live(s) show the album in a new light for me. 

Mode of Kisou is awesome. Jessica live sounds fantastic 

[Saishu 1589]

Withering to death is hot farts

[Kabukichoatmidnight 269]

I didn't really want to vote for a worst as I don't really dislike any of their albums.... 😕

[Romlaw 82]

I really don't understand the amount of hate TIW receives since IMHO its tied with Vulgar as my favorite, Vulgar is better lyrics-wise though and that is also the part about TIW that generally feels lackluster. Also RED...[em] solo is so sick, I wish Die had more parts like that in other songs, that song live in the Mode of Vulgar was definitely the highlight to me. I WISH they didnt remake obscure because I hate the new one with a passion, was Kyo getting fucked over by some parts of it?

 

I really dislike Arche though, as an album it feels so disconnected that I only ever listened to it fully the first time and after that only listened to the songs that I actually enjoyed. Coming from DSS, the album that got me into them, to this was such a drop that I am glad I actually enjoyed TIW otherwise I would have probably dropped them by now.

 

9 hours ago, Ro plz said:

The bands attitude shifted  after that and I remember there was a lot of talk about them hating each other and possibly disbanding, due to the interviews that dropped post the release of the album. It also didn't help that the performances were and arguably still are pretty bad due to how they recorded DSS. Clearly the band didn't learn their lesson because they proceeded to take the same approach when it came to the Unraveling, which imo aged badly minus a few songs. 

This kinda explains the rumor/talk that I always heard about them that they don´t see themselves as friends and more like business partners, although pinpointing sales failure in someone is almost always a bad idea especially when I believe they seem to have similar creative power with Kaoru being slightly above.

[nick 10212]

U FORGOT TO INCLUDE GANGSTA!!

Otherwise, GANGSTA would be the worst album ever.

[Tokage 5930]

i just wanna go on record & say that Akuro no Oka is kinda boring

 

also i still don't get why people seem to hate Midwife so much.. i think it's one of my favorites on Arche (though i'll admit the ''Kyo squeaking like a hamster at warp speed'' bits feel kinda recycled from DREAMBOX) . As far as Arche tracks go I find Soshaku much more uninteresting

Edited October 23, 2019 by Tokage

[EvilHippy 142]

22 minutes ago, Tokage said:

i just wanna go on record & say that Akuro no Oka is kinda boring

 

also i still don't get why people seem to hate Midwife so much.. i think it's one of my favorites on Arche (though i'll admit the ''Kyo squeaking like a hamster at warp speed'' bits feel kinda recycled from DREAMBOX) . As far as Arche tracks go I find Soshaku much more uninteresting

Agree on Midwife - it's interesting, unusual song from them. Intro could work as a theme in horror movie, imho.
And Soshaku... as much as I liked its teaser, the song itself didn't caught my attention that much.

[Saishu 1589]

Kyo’s vocals in Midwife are tiring in the second half, so at that point I’ve checked out. Also don’t like the lead guitar line in the intro. If you put a guitar in my hands I could probably pluck that out in a few minutes. 
 

Soshaku has a boring chorus. 

[Ro plz 1290]

The way Midwife is played live is how it should've been arranged in the studio. The studio version is ass so while it is a favorite of mine, I can see the gripes people have with it. 

 

Akuro No Oka is another song that only works well live. The MODE of Gauze performance (as well as a majority of that live) is great.

 

Actually, a lot of Dir en grey's old stuff translates well live.

 

Id KILL to see Garden and Erode in 2020

Edited October 23, 2019 by Ro plz

[psychonnect_rozen 585]

1 hour ago, Tokage said:

 

i just wanna go on record & say that Akuro no Oka is kinda boring

 

 

 

Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?!

[R/O 36]

I ranked TIW at the bottom, but that’s mostly because of the production disaster.

 

DSS... oh boy the songs on Uroboros are better, but the way DSS flows together more than makes up for that.

 

And Macabre is the album that introduced me to their music, and the title track is amazing.

[NICKT 147]

I started on Dir en grey the typical weeb way back in the day through Obscure and the Final, then backtracking from there.
In my music library I star songs I like/tolerate, so going by that...

Gauze [09/14]

MACABRE [05/13]

kisou [03/16]

VULGAR [10/15]

WTD. [09/14]

TMAOB [00/13]

Uroboros [10/15]

DSS [07/16]

Arche [01/16]

TIW [02/13]

 

Seems pretty typically partial to that mid weeb chunk where they were two feet in the shock bin but they were yet to fully thrust their head into the arsehole of br00tal.

 

Shows how little lacking I am in articulated music taste, looking through OP's post and seeing some of my favourites in the worst song columns. ;-;

 

Edited October 23, 2019 by NICKT

[Saishu 1589]

6 hours ago, psychonnect_rozen said:

Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?!

Honestly, there’s no reason for it to be over eight minutes long. It’s a very VK thing to take a four minute song and stretch the drama out to six or more minutes, though, so DEG aren’t the only one guilty. 

[Zeus 7997]

22 hours ago, Saishu said:

Honestly, there’s no reason for it to be over eight minutes long. It’s a very VK thing to take a four minute song and stretch the drama out to six or more minutes, though, so DEG aren’t the only one guilty. 

There is no reason for it to be over eight minutes long. I would say the song is a solid six minute banger. But what does it mean when I place it second on the list?

A huge difficulty I encountered when making this list was coming up with the order. Like a lot of others in this topic, I don't truthfully have a Dir en grey album I hate, so instead I organized it from "least favorite" to "most favorite". I did the same thing for the tracks on each album, and then I looked towards the singles and other releases for each period so I could analyze each era as a whole. I ended up with three different lists and this is the output after I merged them all together. That's why I stress the difference between a good Dir en grey album and a good Dir en grey period so hard; it actually does matter.

I'll go through my thought process with GAUZE below.

GAUZE is my third favorite Dir en grey album and the one that introduced me into this world, so I have fond memories of it. When I rate each track individually based on my enjoyment, I get the following score:

 

1."Gauze -Mode of Adam-" 2/5

2."Schweinの椅子" 3/5

3."ゆらめき"  3.5/5

4."Raison Detre" 3.5/5

5."304号室、白死の桜" 4/5

6."Cage" 4/5

7."蜜と唾" 2/5

8."Mazohyst of Decadence" 2/5

9."予感" 4/5

10."Mask" 2/5

11."残-ZAN-" 3/5

12."アクロの丘" 4/5

13."Gauze -Mode of Eve-" 1/5

Ranked on how important I think the song is to the album experience the list changes to this:

 

1."Gauze -Mode of Adam-" 0/5

2."Schweinの椅子" 3/5

3."ゆらめき"  5/5

4."Raison Detre" 3.5/5

5."304号室、白死の桜" 4/5

6."Cage" 5/5

7."蜜と唾" 3/5

8."Mazohyst of Decadence" 5/5

9."予感" 4/5

10."Mask" 1/5

11."残-ZAN-" 2/5

12."アクロの丘" 4/5

13."Gauze -Mode of Eve-" 0/5

When I zoomed out and took a look at the whole GAUZE-era, there are some other tracks that get into the mix such as "-I'll-" and "Unknown...despair...a lost". Tracks we consider classics that fall out of the analysis if we only recommend the album. The fact that these two tracks weren't on the album brings down the score because that is the difference we have been trying to isolate! This is also why MACABRE ranks lower than intended on my list; I love the period to bits but the album has a lot of filler that members can make arguments for cutting and replacing with various other songs. Put all of these factors together and out pops the recommendations I wrote in the first post. Not perfect, but I tried to look at the whole picture and the small details at the same time, so the end result is always fighting against itself in principle.

VULGAR ends up at the top of my list because it's the album that requires the fewest amount of modifications to enjoy the period to the max. Listen to VULGAR + "腐海" and that's everything you need. UROBOROS falls to second because of the sheer quantity of tracks provided in this era and how many unnecessary retakes there are (and the "remastered" edition left an aftertaste of piss in my mouth that has yet to dissipate). 

[nick 10212]

Among these albums, why only UROBOROS got a remastered version? :<

It's good to have though, but it was too soon to remaster a 3-year-old album back then.

 

UROBOROS is probably their masterpiece, and they had to make more money out of it while they still could?

Well, I'm just hoping that they will release more of remastered albums in the future.

[ghost 2687]

10 hours ago, nostalgia said:

Well, I'm just hoping that they will release more of remastered albums in the future.

While this sounds great on paper, I'm very skeptical about how they might be executed as most of their remastering efforts have either been negligible or took something away from the original mix. I did, however, think Vestige of Scratches was an overall good remastering of older tracks and would be totally on board for a similar sound. Songs like "Child Prey" hit so much harder and having a Vulgar remaster with VOS execution would be amazing.

Edited October 25, 2019 by ghost

[Ro plz 1290]

Wasn't the VOS remasters done by various people too instead of their current producers?

 

I think that really helped it out a lot too.

 

[ghost 2687]

32 minutes ago, Ro plz said:

Wasn't the VOS remasters done by various people too instead of their current producers?

 

I think that really helped it out a lot too.

 

Yeah, I believe so.

*This comment is entirely based off credits for mixing that I saw on discogs, just fyi.  

It would've been interesting to see more people remaster the tracks originally done by Tue Madsen since he was such an influence on the band's sound from DSS - Arche. Specifically, I'd be really curious to see what a Japanese sound engineer would do as I feel like there's a stark contrast in the way the songs are mixed on this collection and it seems to be divided by regional preferences (and by regional I just mean that there seems to be a different sound profile preferred by engineers from different countries). For example, it sounds like the Japanese engineers like cutting out the lows more so that the songs sound cleaner, but perhaps a bit on the sterile side for some songs. Western engineers sound like they like keeping the lows more for a bit of a dirtier sound which in turn makes some tracks a bit muddled sounding. Try taking a listen between Filth and Sustain the Untruth and I think what I'm saying might make sense (the prior being re-mixed by a Japanese engineer and the latter by another Western engineer that's not Madsen).

 

Now, you might say it's probably just because Filth was originally from 2001 and STU was from 2014, but if you take a listen to the Cage remaster (1999) I feel like the low ends on this mix are boosted way more than the original. And wouldn't you know, Western engineer. Just my observations, but I really wish Dir en grey would go back to using Japanese sound engineers because, overall, I prefer the way they mix the band's music. No hate against Western sound engineers at all as there are plenty that I love, but for whatever reason the ones that end up working with the band just seem to do a less than stellar job. 

[Licio123 181]

I voted MARROW OF A BONE as the worst only to be remembered it features those three magnificent tracks, as Zeus pointed out. I really can't hate any of their albuns, I'm hopeless, lol.

 

I think MACABRE is their best album (Zeus, can't forgive you for choosing Zakuro as one of the worst and omitting the legendary Hotaru), but my favorite is... DUM SPIRO SPERO. Yes, kill me.

[Zeus 7997]

59 minutes ago, Licio123 said:

I think MACABRE is their best album (Zeus, can't forgive you for choosing Zakuro as one of the worst and omitting the legendary Hotaru), but my favorite is... DUM SPIRO SPERO. Yes, kill me.

But who actually considers "Hotarubi" legendary? I haven't heard a fan say "damn, I was spinning some 'Hotarubi' the other day and those firefly buzzes spoke to me spiritually". It's just...okay to me. On an album from an era with no shortage of ballads to pick, "Hotarubi" doesn't come to mind first. And "Zakuro" is so boring OMG.

[rekzer 599]

Hotarubi was the first DEG song I heard and not even that "special" meaning can stop me from calling it boring after i listened to more from the band.

 

As bad as MOB is as a studio album I can't ignore that when played live is one of their best.

 

DSS is the exact opposite for me, great studio album but while good live most of the songs the band can't fully recreate them.

 

But everything they have recorded lately sounds like shit but then sound amazing when heard live. The Mode of... dvds made me see appreciate all albums in their own ways but if I were to pick the worst studio album it's Kisou.

[Licio123 181]

On 10/25/2019 at 2:58 PM, Zeus said:

But who actually considers "Hotarubi" legendary? I haven't heard a fan say "damn, I was spinning some 'Hotarubi' the other day and those firefly buzzes spoke to me spiritually". It's just...okay to me. On an album from an era with no shortage of ballads to pick, "Hotarubi" doesn't come to mind first. And "Zakuro" is so boring OMG.

 

Man, I really pushed it with "legendary", right! I guezz it's the BUZZ LOL

 

But I like both songs a lot. Always found Zakuro so emotional; maybe it's because of the live performances

[Ro plz 1290]

Hotarubi works well in conjunction with the other Macabre tracks. I know for sure that I cant skip it whenever i listen to the MODE of live of MACABRE in general. Sure its not a Rinkaku or Vinushka but is def a chill groovy track that I've grown to appreciate as time went on.

[Saishu 1589]

When I did my own version of Vestige of Scratches I included both Hotarubi and Zakuro. One after the other even. Which, in hindsight, probably was ill-considered, but it worked at the time. 

[ghost 2687]

I don't revisit Hotarubi on its own ever, but I've always liked it when I listen to Macabre from front to back. Toshiya's got some great bass lines.

 

Side note, I really wish I could've seen them during their Macabre tour aesthetic back in the earl 2000's. It's gotta be my favorite look from the band.