It sounds like a completely different album. I didn’t tweak Die, Kaoru, or Shinya much. Just lowered some levels around key critical bands. Kyo I left alone entirely. Toshiya I upped the sub-bass a little bit and used the limiter to bring him up. Dropped the volume a few decibels to avoid clipping and I was done.
The production of Kisou is not great, that’s for sure but the intrinsic quality of their music are indisputable, i think.
i see dirus best to worst is being discussed again, which reminded me i never participated. i feel like leaving this here and causing some chaos
my take on Diru’s best to worst:
Dum Spiro Spero
Withering to death
Arche
The Unraveling
Marrow of a Bone
Phalaris
Vulgar
Gauze
Kisou
Insulated World
Six Ugly
Missa
Macabre
runs away
I’ve always felt that the predictor for liking Kisou in particular is how much you like Industrial and Noise-Rock, and can stomach that being blended with pop rock.
(Small wall of text below)
Summary
Earlier albums obviously have their more Pop-Rock sound - even with their noisy metal sound leaking through, so as long as you can stomach pop-rock, some punk, and other VK of the time you’ll be fine.
And obviously their post-Vulgar output leans heavily on Metalcore and later Tech-Death and Djent so if you like those you like those - they play it pretty straight, their occasional emphasis on ambience and “horror-y” styling not withstanding.
Kisou’s just a strange inbetween, they didn’t fully abandon their poppy sound, while embracing more metal and industrial/noise elements without necessarily the experience in composing for said genres compared to their earlier style.
Like, I love industrial and noise-adjacent (Emphasis on the “adjacent”) music, so Kisou clicks for me and might be my favorite overall DEG album (Even if I don’t listen to it as a complete experience too much and the ballads can overstay their welcome a bit.) with it’s weird hybrid of punk, pop-rock, metal and industrial/noise.
But if you don’t like that blending, especially given that songs switch from being heavy to being ballad-y every other track, or even mid-track sometimes, you’ll not like Kisou.
It’s kinda like the album’s existence is a prerequisite for Vulgar and Ugly Six’s style, effectively.
I guess the band probably didn’t wanna try jumping straight into heavier stuff completely yet, and so suffers from being a divisive mid-point in how they made music.
SUCH an interesting experiment and experience! It really is like an entirely different recording.
Some of the tracks, I don’t really think it works super well - ‘Kigan’ is fast and the low end of the drums takes up so much space, that just adding low end on the bass makes them clash, I think. I saw BlossomingRuin’s comment on the YT video - I’m not sure the bass isn’t present in the refrain, so much the original bass tone is so distorted and midrange focused, that the stem separation software isn’t able to really latch on to it?
Other songs, you’ve truly elevated the listening experience. ‘24 Cylinders’ is a big one, the extended low end gives the melodic bass lines so much more weight and heft. ‘Bottom of the death valley’ as well. ‘Jessica’ I thought would suffer a similar issue as ‘Kigan’ but I was very pleasantly surprised, it honestly just sounds like this is what the song was meant to sound like.
When boosting the bass, how did you do it? Was it a simple EQ boost, or did you use something like MaxxBass/RBass that adds extra harmonic content?
I’m gonna put all this in a spoiler and spare everyone else the scroll.
Summary
In terms of Toshiya’s presence, Kigan is the worst offender on Kisou.
They AJFA’d Toshiya on this album. In every other track, I was able to extract something resembling a bass tone. Kigan has next to nothing, especially during the chorus. Take a look.
Toshiya is the top. I isolated the bass stem in REAPER and confirmed that he’s playing during the verses and disappears entirely during the chorus. He’s not in the guitar stem either. I cross-referenced what I’m hearing during the guitar stem with tabs and confirmed the bass stem is playing Toshiya’s part and the part that’s very mid-range focused and what I thought was Toshiya is likely Die. Toshiya pokes through at the outro in the guitar stem just a little bit, but otherwise does not show up in that stem at all. Toshiya’s bass has a very distinct tone throughout the rest of the modified version of the album that is conspicuously absent during the chorus and the solo. He may as well not be playing.
Here’s the frequency analyzer on just the extracted bass part during the solo.
That tiny little blue nub is all you get from Toshiya. And here’s during the verses:
A little better, but not really. But do you see what I see? One is that high pass filter around 50hz, which takes out a ton of sub-bass information (you know this). I can’t work with what’s not there! The second is that he’s just turned down really low. Like really low. Like it’s almost hazing. Were they beefing or something?
Here’s Die and Kaoru’s volume in comparison.
Like there’s no question: he’s just not there.
For Die and Kaoru I was simply confirming that there was so information for them in those ranges either. I was looking for some Toshiya and didn’t find it, and I was also hoping that by turning them down in this range, that Toshiya could poke through. The EQ adjustments in the upper range would be so that Die, Kaoru, and Shinya don’t clash during Pink Killer.
Also the EQ points I chose are not random. They’re all G, E, or B.
Summary
The first thing I did was source a lossless copy of Kisou. All that extra information is going to be important when you run the tracks through UVR5 on ‘demucs’ to extract four stems (there are online services that can do the same thing). Threw the stems into REAPER and then applied the above EQ curves. The only one I didn’t show was Shinya:
I didn’t touch Kyo.
All the original EQ curves were tested against Pink Killer and then applied to every track for consistency.
After that, I put Toshiya through a limiter and dropped the threshold until the wave form was reasonable, because you legitimately cannot hear him. This picture (and every picture above) is after I raised it to where the verses won’t clip, and you can see the wave form during the chorus is just small. Again.
This is the solo (after adjustment):
Then after this, I dropped the master volume 7.4 decibels to counteract the other volume raising shenanigans I did, to bring everything into line. I was targeting an LUFS of -10, and also managed to do everything without clipping.
The last thing I did was upload it to YouTube and decimate the quality to 128 AAC. The FLAC I have sounds a bit less congested, but not really.
I could rant about this for hours. It’s absolutely incredible how fucked the production on Kisou is when you peel back the layers. I tried my best, and I’m glad that it worked out better than anticipated on some tracks! But Kigan will be my crucible, and the fact that it comes first doesn’t really strike confidence in people to listen further.
they would have benefited from asking for more experimental external production like they did with KR cube and filth once in a while again tbh
that way we wouldn’t get SUSTAIN THE UNTRUTH overplayed for 10 years straight, but I don’t think kaoru’s ego will give up the grip he has over band now, and kyo does like a million other things while probably slowly scraping together another five poem books with him howling in an abandoned shinto shrine every other full moon, recording his night sessions on a walkman he had while roading for luna sea or whatever he actually does on top of his band work
As an industrial fan, this is 100% true. Among my favourite bands are pre-2005 NIN, Blam Honey, Coil, Curve, KMFDM, pre-reform Skinny Puppy, etc. So it stands to reason that Kisou is also my favourite DEG album.
In my opinion, Kisou has more-or-less perfect production for the aesthetic it’s trying to achieve. It’s true there is some industrial inspiration there, but the album is just as (if not more) influenced by the rawness of garage punk.
The original UROBOROS is similar in some ways. I find it to be a more sincere album than the remix due to its unrefined immediacy and shameless imperfections.
Macabre is my second favorite album after Kisou. The tastes and colors eh!
Yeah, sonically, Kisou is mostly an abomination. When everyone was up in arms over how TIW sounded, I was just like “it’s better than fucking Kisou” lol.
Macabre is a personal favourite of mine, even though it could definitely do without without KR Cube and egnyrise. I always felt like they lacked the energy and the edge most of the album has. Like most of the instruments have their attack a bit too long.
I’m so curious about this now. Because live you can definitely hear Toshiya playing a bass part in the refrain.
I want to try and isolate the bass in a different way and see what’s going on. I think I might be able to isolate the center using a mid-side matrix and some phase trickery. Depending on how things were panned and how much crosstalk existed throughout whatever console Kisou was mixed on, we might be able to get an isolated file of mostly just the center information
It HAS to be buried in there somewhere. It just has to be
Let me know what you find!
Now when the dust has settled, would you guys say that The Devil in Me works as a stand alone single, is it strong enough - or would it rather fit as a “random new song” on their next album?
I’d say stand alone. Feels more like a Phalaris left over.
For me the below average song of Macabre are Berry and above all Audrey which i find rather forgettable.
I like some of the ideas but it just doesn’t scream lead single to me
Do you guys think we will get more vinyl re-releases of older albums? Macabre anniversary is soon and I really would like that album to get an LP edition. And just imagine kisou on vinyl with a better production and mix….
Both Macabre and Kisou would be amazing. But I’m not sure if the Gauze LP sold well enough for them ro do it again. It seemed to linger on TR pretty long for Limited Edition.
If they do it, I hope they take their time with it. Both cover artworks would work really well for a vinyl too imo. For Gauze I had been hoping for a little revamp that picks up both covers.
I just checked some of the shops I usually buy and the Gauze LP is still available to order on juno.co.uk so if anyone is interested, here ya go
The Macabre cover would look gorgeous in LP format! Kisou as well! But my favourite albums to have on vinyl would be Vulgar and Arche. Btw: what is TR?