I’m gonna need you to listen and watch this while I rant. It’s connected.
I fell off MIYAVI a long time ago, shortly before his genre switch into EDM. I’m not too familiar with Dué le quartz, I’m pretty comfortable with MIYAVI’s output from 雅楽-gagaku- to around 7 Samurai Sessions or maybe even Room No. 382 (I only listened once though). This gives you an idea of what I like from his discography and where I’m going with this.
Here’s the first combo opinion: The first part is that I don’t like it when I see guitarists in a music video pantomime the wrong finger positions. I get the same kind of confusion like when I’m watching dubbed kung fu movies or anime and the mouth movements don’t line up with the conversation.
The second part of my opinion is that I don’t like when I see an instrument being used as an accessory. It’s an instrument in a music video - I expect it to do a bit more than hang around the neck! MIYAVI’s got such a beautiful Strat, and we all know he’s got great guitar skills, and moments like 1:19 take me completely out of the music video when he’s hammering away on the frets and the song is a cappella.
I’m assuming that a lot of the “EDM parts” that we hear are actually guitars in disguise. I think this because the breakdown and the solo, while wildly different tonally, has a very guitar character. In fact, for me it is the most traditionally rock part of the song!
I’m gonna make another wild assumption here. MIYAVI is using a ton of gear that we aren’t seeing in the music video. A lot of the magic in music happens in the DAW, but sometimes there are effects that you can’t replicate in software. I wonder if he has a Source Audio C4, Boss SY-1/SY-200, some sort of fuzz before the distortion early in the chain for some bite, and maybe some kind of wah to move the EQ peak around. So he’s still a guitar god, he’s just obsessed with the EDM sound.
For as much as I wanna say that MIYAVI sold out by dropping his guitar focused sound for a more EDM sound, my gut says that’s really not accurate for me. I can’t even say he’s alone in this sound because Black Gene For The Next Scene did this sound first, and they had a big EDM lean too. And they had lots of fans, some from XodiacK and some because they truly enjoyed this.
But comparing BFN to MIYAVI, I can hear how the guitars play more of a role for BFN. For one, Black Gene had a bassist that made his presence known. Five plays through MIYAVI’s single and I totally forgot to even look for the bass, so on play six I really listened hard for it. I don’t hear any real low-end until the aforementioned breakdown, which may have been an intentional choice to give it max impact, but it leaves the rest of the song feeling hollow.
And when I go back to his early output, the bass had such a role in driving some of his rock tracks. Here’s one of my favorite.
This encapsulates the difference between “old” and “new” MIYAVI for me, because what’s the first thing you see in this music video? A Marshall stack next to a flying V! And you can really feel the bass when it hits twenty seconds in.
But let’s move beyond bass and electric guitar. What about acoustic? MIYAVI, if you are reading this, I want you to know that you had a big impression on me with your skills on acoustic. He was completely unmatched in visual kei at that time. He was doing innovative stuff (for the scene back then). No one could touch the vulnerability of Itoshii Hito or the spicy energy of Fuminshou no Nemurihime. Even now, there aren’t a lot of acoustic-focused visual kei projects.
Maybe I’m not looking deeply enough, but I feel like acoustic MIYAVI has been lacking lately. This EDM push has gone on for so long that this is the style I associate with him now. Does anyone here have a recent MIYAVI acoustic track? I’d like to hear what that’s like.
Third unpopular opinion: I think that MIYAVI should leave the EDM energy for his solo endeavors and have THE LAST ROCKSTARS focus on rock and acoustic guitar. It’s in the name. I don’t like how everything he touches has to have this EDM sound infused into it. It’s probably working for him, and it’s definitely a safe and workable sound, but I’m yearning for something different from this man specifically and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get it. Side projects should be an avenue to explore different sounds that wouldn’t fit in with your main act.
I guarantee a lot of visual kei fans would stop making a joke of THE LAST ROCKSTARS if they dropped a mini-album tomorrow with six solid tracks. In my mind, I see three Yoshiki-flavored rock tracks, including an infamous Yoshiki rock ballad. A Hyde track with FAITH-styled energy would go so hard. Sugizo gets a free pass to do whatever. And then I’d love to hear an acoustic song courtesy of MIYAVI. I think that mini-album would sell bananas. In fact, I know that mini-album would sell. That’s low-key what everyone expected.
But we got EDM MIYAVI BIGGIDY BANG energy.
“Mastery” is a bit closer to what I’m envisioning, but I wish the EDM elements like the rising synth and the staccato vocals were not there. THE LAST ROCKSTARS has three guitarists - that instrument should play more of a center role. The song gets so good during the chorus when everything focuses up and it sounds like an actual rock song.
So yeah, long way of saying that I miss a lot of MIYAVI’s guitar-focused music where the guitar sounded like a guitar and not a synthesizer pad. But he’s in a completely different lane now serving a different audience that likes EDM more than rock, and I’m not in that audience anymore.
Off to spin Miyaviuta -Dokusou- one more time. And for those who have never heard -Dokusou-, let me leave you with one last song.
A side-effect of the “post-streaming/insatisfied with streaming, piracy returns” era surely. They’re being introduced to it more and they like it. Not that much more because streaming aka modern radio still exists and still isn’t favoring rock because gen zs exist too. But.
