I’m afraid that this style is outsourced to Petit brabancon now 
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Yeah I wouldn’t want that either, I just thought the specific examples laid out there didn’t sound good lmao
I want an album with Garden, I’ll, and Jealous on repeat.
Something cohesively insane would be great.
I like music to challenge me (in a good way). I don’t want to be thinking “wow, this is definitely a Dir en grey song”, I want to be thinking “wtf am I listening to?”.
It doesn’t need to be understood on first listen, nor even liked. Songs that grow are way better than disposable garbage.
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Yeah, this. When I think of my favorite albums of all time, a lot of them took time for me to get into. Outside of DEG, a great example for me is ‘Rooms of the House’ by La Dispute. I was already a big fan of them, and VERY used to the sound they had been cultivating from ‘Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair’ and refining on ‘Wildlife.’ ‘Rooms of the House’ was suddenly much less chaotic and anxious sounding, not at all what I had come to expect from the band, and at first I couldn’t click with it. Fast forward about a year and a half and it started falling into place for me. Now, more than a decade after the album’s release, it’s one of my most beloved records, and I drove a third of the way across the continent last year to see La Dispute play an anniversary show for the album in their hometown.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these boards before I had a similar experience with ‘Dum Spiro Spero,’ where it never clicked for me until literally the drive to see the band play on the TIW cycle. So I know Dir en Grey are definitely capable of giving me that experience. Hell, as time goes on, even the tracks on Phalaris that seemed less exciting to me have started to grow on me. So I can still hope!
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I listened to Phalaris twice, but I didn’t want to replay any song. Then one day Kamuy appeared in my recommendations, and I really liked it. Maybe I’ll listen to the album a third time someday.
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Phalaris has some great songs
13, kamuy and otogi are very good
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13 is SUCH A FUCKING JAM
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13 & Mouai are absolutely killer tracks stuck on a weird album.
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and not a mention of singular album highlight, Hibiki, to be found. Schadenfreude is one of their best long songs too.
Phalaris is pretty good man idc
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Otogi is such a sleeper hit imo, I grew to love that song
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I have to mention Eddie because no one else has mentioned Eddie yet
Eddie is life
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Perfect moshpit song
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I wouldn’t describe Phalaris as safe. The song structures are very out-there and a few songs are extremely strange. In comparison to Dir en grey maybe Phalaris’ level of variety has come to be expected (and Phalaris has a lot of new sounds for them) but not in comparison to anyone else.
I’m always impressed by this band to do different genres but in ways that are thematically cohesive especially with the album they’re on but also with their ethos as a band. Genre-switching for the sake of it would make it seem more like a gimmick. I don’t want it to get too goofy. I like that they seem to try to take making music seriously.
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Honestly, I don’t really hear much diversity on Phalaris, and it feels like I’ve already heard all of this from them before, especially the melodic phrases, that the thing I usually focus on first. I’d be genuinely interested to hear what exactly you consider diverse or new for them on Phalaris, as someone who probably focuses on different aspects of music.
As for new things: the black metal bits on The Perfume of Sins and Schadenfreude stand out. Kyo uses a new variation of the “buddhist chanting” on Mouai ni Shosu and Otogi. That weird voice he does on the rap section of Utsutsu, Bouga wo Kurau is a voice he hasn’t used elsewhere and doesn’t even sound like him. Those are things that are easy to point to and describe and remember off the top of my head, but it’s not like the rest of the songs are the same thing they’ve done before except in a very vague sense like “they’re both metal songs that alternate between screaming and singing” which yeah if stripped of 99% of what goes on you can make it sound like that. You could say Akuro no Oka and Kamui are both 9 minute slow songs or that Eddie and Devote My Life are both songs that feature screaming from beginning to end to make them sound like they sound the same, but they don’t. Diabolos, Vinushka, World of Mercy, and Schadenfreude are all similar in being 10 minutes long and alternating between singing and screaming. But the structures and most everything else about them is different (and if you didn’t include “screaming” in the genre-description then Mazohyst of Decadence, Akuro no Oka, Macabre, Zakuro, Kamui would all be lumped together with them - just to highlight how superficial this grouping actually is for what are actually very unique songs) and they’ve only done this very eclectic style 4 times and I see people say they’re sick of it but in comparison many bands will release 4-5 minute songs in the same genre with verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure for 12 songs on one album, and do the same thing the next album, and so on. As for what I mean by diverse - I mean the songs stylistically, structurally, etc. are different from each other and feature a wide variety of sounds. I’m not sure how it could be argued they don’t.
But completely switching genres with every album isn’t a standard any band lives up to, and if there’s any bands that come close, then DEG is one of those. So I just think this is the last criticism that should be levied at them. The difference between Devote My Life and Eddie is already about as wide of a style gap as many other bands ever branch into and that’s maybe the weakest example to use for the variety of sounds in DEG.
I’m not sure if they could do more in this regard than they already do without it getting silly. If Candis was featured on Phalaris then I would take it since it’s a good song, but I’m not sure why it would need to be.
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Hot take phalaris is good
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Phalaris is great, the only thing that sucks is when Kyo does that cringey WAAAHHHH AHHHH AHHH AHH AHHHHHH on Otogi
Otherwise it’s a fantastic album
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13 is easily in top 5 of their best songs ever.
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He’s saying “tathāgata” and it’s awesome.
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