I swore that remix was a fever dream of mine. Does that mean that FILTH Hokubukeisatsu Part 2 is REAL?!
Nope 
The lyrics being about nostalgia/innocence/regret and the background having young people sounding like they’re having fun fits to me.
Audrey is an absolute bop. It’s one of the most dance-y songs in their catalog and fills its roll well. It’s also one of the only songs non-metal, non-jrock fans seem to like when I try to introduce people to DEG.
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I think the biggest negative of the album is that it’s just so dang long. They could’ve cut 2-3 tracks.
I’d personally cut Taiyou no Ao, Zakuro, and replace Audrey with a different new song of similar length and less poppy. Would be a near perfect album for me then. Stacking two 6+ minute ballads at the end was a bad choice imo and really killed the pacing of the album there. It’d be shorter than Gauze this way, but I think 50-60 min for an album is a good length.
I freakin’ love Hydra and Macarbre though. From what I’ve seen Hydra doesn’t seem to be as popular with other listeners. But I love it because it’s almost like a dark acid electro song. The riffs and guitars are less melodies and more textures adding to the soundscape. The drums have this quick and snappy pattern that makes them quirky yet fitting. Yes, I’ll even take the lull in the middle with the chanting.
I also think this Hydra would be one of the coolest live songs to have ever watched from the band during their 2000’s Macabre tour. The tvs in the background with Toshiya giving mad fan service + the light show. I was born too early.
Link hops to 22:45 where hydra starts
=
Macabre has a special place in my heart though because it’s the first physical vkei CD I ever bought and I bought it at Japanese book store in person. It was the special etched case version with beads too. Not hard to find at all these days, but it was the coolest thing I owned at the time. Still kept the hype sticker from the original shrink wrap.
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Youd cut Zakuro?!?! Thats a great tune! I love emotional vibe of it. 100% with you on Hydra though, thats an underrated classic! + Always sounds so much better on those live recordings. Im just sad that they “rerecorded” it and basically are forgetting the original.
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I don’t get how someone would do that to Zakuro either. I personally used to think that Macabre was my favourite album but, yeah, it’s too long. Nowadays I’d probably skipDeity (or shorten it), the syringe one and KR Cube. Not bad tracks, but not their best.
A few months ago, I also realised how good Kisou is. I mean, I loved some tracks on it, but couldn’t really think of it as one of their best albums. It doesn’t contain my favourite songs, but as a whole, it’s probably better than half their catalog.
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@DirDude @Qventin I know, i know. It’s a blasphemous take. But I just think it brings the pacing of the album down. I’m ready for the album to end right around Rasetsukoku, and it just keeps going. And I can’t think of anywhere else to put it on the album as I think the track listing fits together quite nicely as is. While I think Zakuro is an excellent ballad on its own, I also think something like Hotarubi fits in better sonically with the album’s sound.
I like the rerecording, but I agree. It’s unfortunate they’ve replaced the original with it.
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The version of the MACABRE DVD @ghost posted above was horrible quality despite the title, so I did a brief search and found a much better source.
Hadn’t seen this particular video, so decided to give it a watch in full last night.
What’s good:
• Seeing the band having fun, laughing and joking with each other and in general being in good spirits. Even Kyo, who barely speaks anymore in more recent documentary footage. Now they’re mostly deadly serious. I miss this playful side of the band greatly.
• Traditional VK attire. Spiking each others’ hair, wearing latex bondage gear, etc. The scene where Kyo gets painted white has a lot of humour (and let’s not forget the RC tank).
• Seeing old material played in the context of the time it was written. Something truly magical about this.
What’s bad:
• There are outspoken naysayers in the community who nitpick the audio quality of recent releases. I’m no different in this respect, and do believe that we should always expect the best from such a popular band. It’s disappointing when things don’t match expectations; even if the actual content of the music is subjective, the actual production should at least be half-way decent. However, here the audio quality is nothing short of abysmal, and the visuals are middling in places, too. It ranges from sounding like an okay bootleg to almost unintelligible garbled distortion. Of course recording live gigs is always difficult due to the volume levels, and it’s nice to actually see the shows, but at the same time, it’s not massively entertaining to sit through a not-insignificant amount of completely crushed audio.
• The editing. What the heck were they thinking? There’s one song which is maybe played in full ([KR] Cube) and a few partial recordings (Myaku, MACABRE, Zakuro). The live debut of ain’t afraid to die is on here, too, but even that is disappointingly only a partial recording. What unfortunately makes up most of the 2-hour runtime is tiny snippets of songs, all just a few seconds each. Not sure what exactly this is trying to showcase, as there’s no way for the brain to latch onto whatever the heck is going on before the next clip begins. It’s not artistically edited, it’s slapdash and random, and the whole production suffers for it.
What truly sucks is that this appears to be the only documentation of the live shows from that time period. Most of the performance itself is lost to time. I’m glad I was able to watch the DVD finally, but will certainly not revisit it.
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This is one thing about expectations is i think people often get themselves too hyped up and build their own idea of what they personally want and its rarely achieved, which is fair enough. It’s nice to be excited for a new release but perhaps its better to just enjoy it for what it is, rather than hate it because its not what what an individuals expectations of it are.
I’d love to know what people who say the production of Dir albums also listen to as speaking from the perspective of someone who is a musician from a predominantly extreme metal background I cant say any of their releases are “badly” produced, faultless? No, but come on it could be WAY worse… I kinda wonder if people who criticise the productions are used to more mainstream production as pop fans or whatever.
I think that’s the thing about this particular DVD. It’s more of an official bootleg, documentary style release. Quality is still bad especially when compared to their other lives around the time. The Osaka Jo Hall performance is much better quality despite being released earlier. Maybe it was a deliberate choice by the band. But I agree, we need more full performances from this era in better quality than what’s on this DVD.
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Agreed. When I wrote that, I was thinking about some of the comments on the recent 25th Anniversary DEPRESSION mode of… release which feel unfounded when compared to the sound on this MACABRE DVD.
The one glaring exception to this conversation is TIW, which is objectively badly mastered to the point that it’s exhausting to listen to (in terms of compression and audio fatigue). TIW is the only album I own that’s improved when played at a low volume.
The PHALARIS LP is worth noting too. It’s mixed so much better than the original release that the latter doesn’t sound good in comparison. But honestly, aside from some minor mastering issues, I was happy enough with the CD when I first got it. The weirdest thing about this LP is that it’s a remix & remaster that happened only a year after the original release, while TIW (which desperately needed it) was left in the dust.
The rest of the catalogue sounds great to me (Hageshisa album version notwithstanding). ARCHE has gotten hate for its mix and I can’t understand why!
With the 19990120 single being released with selections from the GAUZE era on the bonus disc, one wonders what else is in the vaults. Curious to see whether this footage is in HD. Guess we’ll find out in two months. It’s doubtful we’ll see more old live material being released, although stranger things have happened.
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Maybe they just needed to release it at the right time for maximum profits. Papa Kaoru needs a new guitar and he knows fans eat that old stuff up! I kid. But it does make you wonder if they do have old content that they could release someday. I personally want to see some album recording footage in general from the band’s early days.
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They must have ridiculous amounts of stuff recorded they could do something with. They got a handful of dvds which have those hotch potch of random shows melded together so i would assume as they are mostly pro footage that the whole show would have been filmed. I remember also the vestige documentary dvd had some clips of some really early shows so the vaults must have a ton of old stuff pretty much from the beginning. Imagine the amount of money that literal mountain of content would cost. Probably more footage there than on pornhub. Haha.
- Anyone who complains about anything to do woth ARCHE is insane, that album is a literal masterpiece.
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Echoing NowhereGirl. TIW is the only album I have issues with. It’s squashed to hell and grating to listen to. I listen to all kinds of music with all different kinds of production value (yes, this does in fact include mainstream pop sometimes) but it’s not the quality that’s the issue. It’s the mixing/mastering. There are lofi black metal and bedroom pop albums that sound better than TIW simply because they’re mixed better and the frequencies are more balanced.
I think Slipknot’s Vol 3. is a comparable example where it’s a fine album musically, but the post-production process ruined it. The vinyl editions in this case don’t save it either because it just highlights the issues of the original mix/master since they never bothered to do a remaster/remix from the ground up.
Dir en grey album’s sound fine most of the time. Really the only low points for me are TIW and Uroboros to an extent. I actually don’t mind the rough mixing on the latter, but it for sure could’ve used more care. I know they released the expanded and remaster mix, but I honestly don’t like it. It sounds TOO clean imo.
For me, The Insulated World IS the “WAY worse” example because every time I listen to it I have to wonder if it’s just a transcode with the treble increased post in audacity. The drums especially bother me because they’re so muddled and they applied way too much reverb. Those snare and toms sound like they’re covered under a garbage bag, like, they’re so damn muddled god damn.
It’s a claustrophobic mix and the dynamics are shot. As-is, the music isn’t able to breath. When the compositions need to get loud, the music just crunches together because there’s nowhere else to go. The bass especially gets lost because I think the mix might be mixed with more lower frequencies or something so it blends with the guitars. Overall, there is no impact to the mix because there’s a lack of contrast or fine tuning applied to each part. Each instrument is clamoring for the spotlight, and when you have 5 people all yelling for your attention you just want to turn around and leave.
Now, others might be ok with that and it’s fine. But these are the reasons why I abhor the mix/master on this album and can’t listen to it despite some pretty good song writing.
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sustain the untruth
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When everyone talks about the mastering on TIW being bad (or even “objectively bad”) I feel like we are existing on alternate timelines or like I am going crazy. There was a discussion not too long ago about basswork and the accusation was that Toshiya has essentially gotten more lazy with his basswork in terms of just following the guitars and blending in and TIW was used as an example. I gave a few songs I remembered having distinct basslines as a counter argument, and someone somewhat agreed with me but said Toshiya was being drowned out by the mixing. I’ve listened to the album and their others since then and I might have to say I think he is more prominent on that album than any other both in terms of interesting basswork and being able to distinguish it clearly. Even in the heavier songs which for most heavy bands I usually can’t distinguish bass at all. Listening to DSS right now (which I love and think has great mastering), and Toshiya specifically doesn’t shine as often as I can hear him on TIW.
Haha yep I hear you. Songs like Devote my Life he is being so lazy and uncreative… Honestly i think its just the songs that make it difficult to deviate from following the guitar too much. It is a skill in itself knowing when to follow and when not to and i never really had an issue with the basslines in the album. And think the same that at times what hes doing does really stand out and gives a real nice oomph to the track.
Is the Devote My Life thing sarcasm? Lol I can hear him rumbling during the verses and the bassline in the chorus is the best part of the entire song. He follows the guitars somewhat in Keibetsu to Hajimari but the fact that I can even hear him to know that in such a heavy song is evidence of very good mastering. He also gets that little bass solo which is one of the coolest parts of the song. I can hear him very clearly in Downfall too which is another heavy one. In the softer songs on the album he stands out as much as the guitars doing his own thing. Far from being drowned out Toshiya is one of the biggest driving forces on this album.
Mostly metal, but truly a bit of everything. Like, grew up on Enya, first guitar teacher was a classical musician, there’s a lot of rap and old-school country I really love, Caroline Polachek is a master of really expressive and emotive pop music imo… I’m also an audio engineer, and I’ve worked with a decent variety of bands from punk to funk-rock to full on metal
Other than TIW I don’t hate the production on any of their albums. I have albums I prefer the sound of over others, and pretty strong opinions about admittedly very minor details, and oftentimes they’re contradictory. E.G. I generally love the slickness of the production on Arche, whereas that same sheen that exists on The Unraveling EP just highlights to me how un-inspired the performances were on the remakes // on the other side of the spectrum the roughness Macabre has kind of loses me compared to the warmth of Gauze, but the even rougher and in many places straight up clipped recordings on TMOAB are part of what makes that record one of my favorites and I don’t want it to sound any different
I think in general though, my lean is towards “better produced” albums, both as a consequence of me being an engineer and also as a result of the bands that got me into heavier music in the first place. Andy Sneap, David Bendeth, and Joey Sturgis especially were huge influences to me on the production end of things. Their work with bands like Killswitch Engage, Underoath and Paramore (that RIOT snare is still the GOAT), and all those early Risecore bands respectively, were at the vanguard imo of pushing production tastes for their time. Not to say they’re flawless, but they were massively influential for me in shaping my tastes
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