Post your "UNPOPULAR" Japanese music opinions! / aka "HOT TAKES" :P

Japanese Music
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Oh boy, who shoved the stick up @Zeus’s ass again?

I’m back with another spicy hot take for your Saturday morning reading needs. It’s one I’ve had for a while but never got around to posting. It’s also a rather recent hot take of mine, because it’s something you have to leave the visual kei scene and explicitly explore before you can come back and have your opinion changed.

I don’t think that there’s a lot of jazz influence in visual kei proper. I’m guilty of throwing this descriptor around in the past too, but it wasn’t until I started exploring jazz and jazz adjacent genres that I realized just how not jazz most of what we call jazz in visual kei is. I would describe it as an unholy mash of blues, heavy metal, math rock, ska, with elements of bebop and swing. Jazz-adjacent? Sure…sometimes. Jazz? No.

I even swat away bands that people reach for instinctively like MERRY and Sugar. I don’t have everything by either of these bands, but I do have enough to come to a reasonable conclusion. For MERRY, I went 現代ストイック → 個性派ブレンド クラシック~OLDIES TRACKS~ → モダンギャルド → PEEP SHOW → nuケミカルレトリック → M.E.R.R.Y and out of all of those releases I found one jazz track and one or two blues tracks that met my criteria. A few of their album openings have some jazz flavor but they don’t qualify as full songs to me. The jazz song in particular was a rendition of Tokyo Telephone that was a bonus track on a compilation? One song does not make a jazz band.

To be perfectly clear, MERRY are capable of playing jazz music. They just lean more towards blues, punk, and rock than jazz.

I don’t have as much music by Sugar, mostly because finding music by Sugar is a pain in the ass. That’s strike one; your vanguard for jazz music in visual kei shouldn’t be this obscure. The second strike is that the only remotely jazz-adjacent track out of the four releases I have is 惡ノ華咲ク、夢ノ又夢 from mental sketch modified. The rest of the music is moody alternative rock. I’m more convinced that they are an alternative rock band than a jazz band.

If both of these are considered jazz bands then those songs might be on releases I don’t have. Does someone care to point me in the right direction?

Now I’m coming in with the low blows and singling out a lot of my favorite “jazz” tracks.

The song would be more convincing if they dropped the damn metalcore antics and distortion on the guitars for just one song. They are completely capable of power ballads with no creepy whimpering or screaming, why can’t you do the same for this? Anytime they get close to building a convincing, moody atmosphere they ruin it with power chords from Nowhere, Osaka. Still a fun track though. HELLO MY PINKU / 10.

Never has a song made me stop fucking with a band so fast. I remember shitting on this song and calling it a poor attempt at jazz, but that was really showcasing my limited musical vocabulary at the time. EROS is jazz-adjacent, but not really jazz. If I had to peg it now, it’s like a mix of 80’s glam rock mixed with ska. Ska originates from Caribbean mento and calypso fused with American jazz and rhythm and blues, which is why I (and many others) originally reached for that term when it came out. I don’t want to overwhelm my post with too many video thumbnails, but click this link to be taken to a ska playlist on YouTube. Sample a few songs and you’ll start understanding why I’m using ska and not jazz to describe EROS. Still don’t like it though. SCANDALOUSLY / 10.

I love Dir en grey, so I’m going to relish in asking the obvious question of what the fuck is this goofy ass song? LMAO. The ghost notes, minor scatting, and that rolling rhythm in the beginning that I would attribute to jazzy styles of music, but the rest of the song is more firmly in rock territories for me. And I’m still not exactly sure what the section starting at 1:56 is supposed to be. This song is just a showcase of another awkward mix of heavy metal, rock, and blues, sprinkled with enough jazzy elements to make me question exactly what I’m listening to. BRRRR/10

II.injury comes straight out of the era of visual kei where every metalcore band tried to conquer the blues scale. There was a time when I jumped straight to “jazz” to describe this, but this is really more bluesy x heavy metal with a splash of some core and jazz influence. This is also VanessA’s first song, which just makes me more confused as to why a metalcore band would want to lead with this. If anything, it’s only a hint as to where they would end up going; after bassist Nao (better known as 70. from XANVALA/FIXER) departed, Haruki (also better known as Ippo from MEJIBRAY) was main composer and VanessA chased a lighter, more bluesy sound.

By now you’re thinking one of two things: “what is this old ass the GazettE track” or “You heretic! How can you shit on Sumire???”. And the thing is, I’m not actually shitting on the track. I actually like it! It’s just that if you listen to the first fifteen seconds and you hear that piano you’d think the entire track is jazzy. It’s not. The piano virtually disappears until the outro…so even though it has some jazzy overtones I can’t really consider it a jazz rock track if like 40 seconds of the track tops has any influences from that domain. I also don’t understand why it was not on the MADARA reissue, but that’s a topic for another time…

For the record, I leverage the same criticism with 虚無の終わり 箱詰めの黙示. the GazettE dip their toes in the waters and they paint a really good atmosphere with this song. One of my favorite B-sides from the DIM era! But the longer the track goes on, the less I can justify calling it jazz rock. I have to settle for influences instead…and that’s kinda what I’m hinting at with all these examples.

So what kinds of songs do I think have enough “jazz” influence to be considered jazz? I’ll leave them as links instead so you don’t have to scroll.

BLU-SWING - YOU WOULD NOT UNDERSTAND
8-eit - 戯れGOLD (they were considered vk at one point too!)
Jill-Decoy Association - 輪
Mouse on the keys - spectre de mouse
Tokyo Jihen - 秘密 (Live)
jizue ft. Shing02 - 真黒

This is not an exhaustive list, just a sampler.

In my books, it’s not enough to have “influence” to be considered jazz rock. Jazz, like metal, is intentional. You don’t accidentally create metal music. As a composer, you have to be willing to step fully into the domain and flex different muscles and avenues of expression. You can fuse jazz and rock but I haven’t found too many cases of someone fusing jazz and metal in a way that I like. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done though! It’s just that when it comes to visual kei, it’s like 80% rock and 20% everything else and it’s just not jazzy enough to be “jazz” to me.

I hope I explained stuff and didn’t come off as an elitist prick, but after beginning to study music I find that it’s really important we use the right words to describe the sounds we are chasing.

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It would have been way cooler if late-stage gazette had reita graduate from the noseband, instead of moving onto the weird mask-noseband thing.

I would have been like “wow respect”

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anti/DEFEAT was the only HYDE album that i can enjoy. and i wish we got DRINK IT DOWN Remake, it feels like the l’arc style limits the song potential.

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Back with another unpopular opinion, because you know by now I have plenty of those.

I don’t understand what the hate is against ghost writers. Music is an inherently collaborative genre where those who come after stand on the shoulders of those who come before. It is very rare that you’ll find an artist that writes and records all of their music only by themselves. If you’re in a band with at least one other person, that person is going to provide input from time to time. So what does it actually matter if the person is in the band or not? That’s just one extra step removed and it’s not a big step to me.

There are artists that make songs and beats all the time and then give them to other artists. Sometimes they do it because that’s their job. Other times it can be because they know they can’t perform the song as well as that artist. Hip hop is the apex of this. Let me provide a good example.

This song is “The Results Are In” off their second mix tape BetterOffDEAD. Right off the bat you can tell it samples a Maury episode, so you can already nod your hat in the direction of Maury Povich because it really does add to the track. What you might not realize is that the beat is sampled from New Genius (Brother) by Gorillaz. Erick lowered the pitch and added a more distinct bass riff.

So now we can add credits to the lead singer 2D, who conceived the song for Gorillaz bassist Murdoc Niccals. You can bet your ass all of the members had a bit of say in the construction of their parts, so add each member of the unit on the credits. You can also throw the producers Jason Cox, Tom Girling, and Dan the Automator on top, because producers are essential to making albums sound great. This song in turn is written in 12 bar blues format and features several references to African American music, sampling “Hit and Miss” by blues and R&B singer Bo Diddley, which in itself was written by a folk and soul singer named Odetta.

This same song was sampled in Just a Poet by Def Jef, Erotica (Kenlou B-Boy Mix) by Madonna, and Erotica (In My Jeep Mix) by Madonna. And this is a very easy way to connect a hip-hop song released in 2013 to an artist born in 1930 and to one of the biggest pop artists of the 80’s.

If I haven’t convinced you yet, all music is connected. We have an entire topic devoted to finding musical similarities! There’s an entire genre of Japanese metal dedicated to covering video game themes from various games, and I’m not just talking doujin! Like…what exactly is the problem with someone from band A going to another member from band B and saying “yeah man, i wrote the core of this melody. It goes like this. This doesn’t fit the style of my band, but it might fit yours. Try it out.” and the other members like the melody, build it into a song, drop it on a single or album, and throw the writer in SPECIAL THANKS somewhere in the bullet. Maybe they throw a few bucks to the original composer as well for their input and labor.

Everyone jumps to Milli Vanilli as the shining example of why ghost writing is bad, but that’s an extreme outlier. If there’s no deception involved, then I’m failing to see the issue. Ghostwriting is an acceptable term to use when the original composer of a song is unclear, but just because that information is unclear to us doesn’t mean that it isn’t known. Ghostwriting is essentially musicians collaborating.

Accept it. Visual kei is not a fountain of creativity where these young, unknown artists pop up a dime a dozen and play a unique variant of metalcore. You have some bright minds pumping out a lion’s share of the music, a lot of groups collaborating as bands to put out music together, and then people swapping ideas to stimulate creativity. And then even if someone gives you the idea for a melody, you still have to be able to play it! Half the time when a song is conceived it’s just the core of the song and it takes time to stitch together the other parts and then practice it until you can play it live (and I’ll let all the musicians and composers chime in here – it’s fucking hard).

I’m currently learning how to play the opening to “Eternal Melody” by E’m~grief~. It’s a melody that starts in A# and sounds super neoclassical. I play it to someone unfamiliar with visual kei and for all intents and purposes I can front like I created it. As long as I (at some point) mention it’s a cover, then what will really impress people is the fact that I played such an interesting melody, not that I wrote it. And that’s just fine! Not everyone has to be a compositional genius.

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: We continued this conversation a bit in the Discord and I came up with another example that helps to illuminate where I am coming from.

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Yes I know the picture is sideways I am too lazy to fix it right now

This is from the back of the booklet of TOUR09 X-RAYS OF ANAPHYLAXIS AND SCREW. This was after X-RAYS but before Cursed Hurricane, so the very last release before they went major. PSC made sure they got their credit, SCREW is at the top, and they included both the original producers and those who did the remaster. On top of that there’s still a “special thanks” section with a bunch of names i don’t recognize. it’s entirely possible that those people helped out in the creation of those songs back when VENOM & VIRUS released. It’s conjecture that I can neither prove nor disprove but it’s a possibility.

And look how many people it took for a top indie band near the boom to get anything done…

EDIT2: I found another example from Japanese music that’s even more staggering. These are the credits for Shiina Ringo’s 日出処 (Hiizurutokoro). For a bit of context around this next picture, this was her first solo album after disbanding Tokyo Jihen in 2012. Half of the album is a compilation of old singles and the rest is new material.

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And these are all the personnel who helped record the music. As far as composition and lyrics go, that’s 95% Shiina. But look how much help she needs to put out one album…

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Not gonna add too much to Zeus’ post, but one example from top of my head would be Angel’s Ladder by Mary’s Blood

It was composed by Yuyoyuppe, who’s probably more known as Yuppemetal (arranger and composer of some Babymetal songs). Aaand, dunno if he was influenced by downtuned guitars from BabyMetal, but Angel’s Ladder was their first song with 7string guitar and 5string bass and overall departure from their power metal sound.
Still a good song, tho.

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I’ve got another unpopular opinion, but I think this is more of an uncommon opinion than an unpopular opinion.

I think established visual kei bands should experiment with pressing more albums on vinyl. I’m specifically taking aim at Dir en grey and the GazettE, but any bands with the funds and fanbase should think about it. It’s a travesty that there are only 10 VULGAR vinyls that exist in the world and only 100 GAUZE vinyls, and I don’t think the GazettE have ever pressed a vinyl record. Vinyls sound great, look cool, and catch eyes more than a CD.

For example, my friend and I went to a concert where I bought a vinyl and he was thinking about buying a CD. Why buy the CD if you have the MP3s on your phone already and the album available on Spotify? Let’s be real: once the album is ripped from the CD, that CD goes back in the case and it goes untouched. It’s a very rare and notable circumstance to actually play CD’s on the regular in 2022. You are not going to listen to a vinyl or a cassette all the time either, but the first is eye candy and the second is for the clout. They create these knowing only collectors want them and they make sure that they look great. A CD can look good, but even the coolest design on a CD can’t compare to the entire package of a well-constructed vinyl. A vinyl can have nice designs, be signed, sound great, have awesome booklets, and they appreciate in value if they are a limited run and you take care of them.

Let’s take VULGAR as an example. This is the regular CD cover:

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This is a picture of what the VULGAR vinyl cover looks like:

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Now let’s not rob those who own this version of their prize, but why don’t we make a reasonably limited run of VULGAR again? 1000, 2000 copies? Why not set this one to a different color? Here are some quick mock ups I made:

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Let’s not stop there. What if we took the design from the CD and the DVD of the limited edition of VULGAR and pressed it onto the vinyl in colors that match the cover?

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Would not that look cool? I think that would look amazing. If you haven’t been seeing pictures of vinyl that I’ve been leaving in places, here’s what vinyl can look like:

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Our member @ghost actually owns this sick piece of vinyl!

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I own all three of these. Top and middle are limited to 1000 a piece. Blue and black is limited to 750 and signed. Together these run you about $220 and they’ll only go up in value…

bt

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They can be clear too!

Sometimes you can have something called an etched surface on a vinyl. That’s when one side of the vinyl (usually side A) has all the music and side B is art and cannot be played. It’s a cool alternative to pressing the same thing twice or leaving it empty. This is an example of one.

Playable side:

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Etched side:

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Do something like this for six Ugly please. If you come up with a new jacket design you can print the back of the original on side B as etched artwork.

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I know asking for MISSA is a long shot but do that one too. Use some old visual kei photo shoots that haven’t been seen by western audiences. It would be so cool.

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Shit, even cassettes can be pretty baller in design. Check this one out:

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Why stop there though? Do every Dir en grey album that hasn’t been pressed to vinyl yet. Go all out. Make it look nice. And please don’t limit it to a knot only.

Have I convinced you yet? Take a look at some prices for vinyls that are out of print. Some editions of Flood by Boris can go for over $200. Domo Genesis & The Alchemist’s “No Idols” goes for $300. Dr. Lecter by Action Bronson sits at around $600. Not every vinyl is this expensive - most really aren’t - but it’s the scarcity of these particular presses that make them go for this much. Good luck selling one of those CDs for anything more than $15, and I’m stretching the budget mostly for Boris.

I would really love for this to be a thing. Internet, let’s make it happen.

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I’m absolutely on board with seeing more vkei pressed on vinyl. It’s insane that Dir en grey’s Gauze or X Japan’s Blue Blood go for $500 - $1000. My guess is that the bands don’t want to front the work and money to actually make these happen + probably licensing related issues or something.

I admit, I’ve dreamt up crazy variants for releases I want to see on vinyl, but I’d galdly buy a nice boxset of Dir en grey albums on nice quality virgin black vinyl in a heartbeat. Something like a “early works” boxset or something would be great.


-vinyl mockup for the GazettE’s Hankou Seimeibun

My only reservation would be about sound quality. Since vinyl in the vkei scene is such a rarity, I haven’t heard anything other than Dir en grey’s Uroboros and Dum Spiro Spero on the format. And those two are not great sound wise. Uroboros has too much fit on each side so the tracks in the middle sound like they were mixed for The Insulated World (low hanging fruit, SORRY ₙₒₜ ₛₒᵣᵣy). Although, the vinyl mix is indeed different and very interesting to compare to the digital version. Dum Spiro Spero sounds like the band took the lazy way out and just pressed the digital files so it doesn’t sound any different than the CD or digital version. I know bands like Mucc have released stuff on vinyl but I haven’t heard it so can’t compare.

In my opinion, there isn’t much point to owning something in an LP format if the audio is lacking even if the packaging has all the bells and whistles. I’ve sold off my fair share of poor sounding records because of this. But then again, everyone has different reasons for owning something.

I honestly don’t see this taking off as a trend in the scene though (much to my dismay) because:

a) CD culture seems to still be going very strong in Japan, especially in the vkei scene. If I had to guess, it’s a low risk and relatively cheap way to produce and sell physical media. Not to mention ease of distribution for bands at stores and live shows. (This is, I think, the main reason even big bands aren’t messing with vinyl and, if they do, why it’s usually released as really limited collectors items)
b) It’s very expensive to produce. Even in the US, there are many smaller musicians with a huge fan following that will have to result to using services like qrates to drum up interest and money from fans. Often times those projects reach their goal and even beyond, but usually not by that much over. I don’t know how easy it is produce records in Japan, but I think it is telling that small J-indie bands get their albums released overseas a lot of times in countries like the UK or even Germany. I think there are other factors to this, but my assumption is that cost is a part of it.

There are independent labels out there holding an interest in pressing music from niche Japanese bands, but those are usually for indie/shoegaze-type bands. I think realistically, vkei is within a niche of a niche and it would be a big risk for independent labels. Unless it’s a passion project, I think the idea of releasing vkei on vinyl would scare them off. Even big bands like Dir en grey or the GazettE.

I have noticed that, in general, there seems to have been an increase of Japanese releases making it’s way onto vinyl. For example, nearly all of Joe Hisaishi’s work for Studio Ghilbli getting reissued for vinyl (even the symphonic editions and image albums), Utada Hikaru’s works being reissued recently, Nujabes and adjacent artists seeing popular albums pressed on vinyl for the first time, and even a lot of old Jazz and City pop albums seeing a second lease on life with represses. Perhaps if this trend continues, this will eventually encourage vkei bands and their labels to try releasing music on the medium. Start small with like a 7" and then move up to a full 12".

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I also do think it’s about production costs compared to how little amount might/would be sold.

Personally I don’t care a single bit about vinyls.
I’d need a player. And I’d need interest to listen to releases song by song until I’m through.

I don’t even own a music system but am one of the people who rip their CDs and listen to the music from a PC and mobile devices. I just don’t care about Spotify and all that stuff because I want to make sure the music I want to listen to is still available. So I go by digital but with the files stored locally.
I prefer mixed playlists, sometimes including a full album, often just certain songs. That’s something that doesn’t work with vinyls as well as with CDs. Most of the time I’m easily bored with the same album playing (only exception so far are new Gazette albums). Often even with just one artist playing.

So besides just not being interested, I needed to buy a player, I’d need to pay extra prices for the vinyl and most likely also would need to buy the CD or digital version to have the music available for other devices as well. Which’s not possible at all just from a monetary point of view for me. And I guess that goes for a lot of people.
Which leads to bands not doing at all and if so just these collectors editions that only those with lots of financial possibilities will go for and that can (as well as need to be) as expensive.

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I really like The Madna’s ‘Mad Game’.

It definitely took a while to grow on me but the song is just so catchy and fun.

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Ah, but that’s exactly the thing. Vinyls are not a replacement for a CD. They are complementary!

I listen to music almost exactly the same way you do. To a shocking degree of similarity even! I too listen to most of my music from PC and mobile devices. I don’t use Spotify for the exact same reason. I still find myself purchasing CDs because those CDs have songs that were never shared or published digitally, or never in good quality.

I fell into the vinyl rabbit hole because I’ve been bulk importing CDs from Mercari for one of two reasons: either I really like the artist and the CD was dirt cheap, or some contents of that release (CD or DVD) are unknown to us fans in the west and I want to figure out what that content is. In every case, I found myself ripping the CD or DVD once and then putting it in storage. Once I have acquired the files digitally, through whatever means necessary, a CD has the same exact function to me as a vinyl or a cassette: it’s basically commemorative media, a physical back up with bonus artwork, decoration, a flex that you’re a huge fan of a certain band or artist. This is basically how the conversation with my concert buddy went.

> "Lemme get that Spiritbox vinyl for $35"
> "Do you even have a vinyl player Zeus?"
> "No, but that can be easily fixed."
> "Big facts. I'm thinking about buying the CD to support the band. It's $15."
> "But don't you already own the CD as files on your PC and phone?"
> "Yeah..."
> "So what would you do with the CD if you aren't going to rip it?"
> "Show my support for the band. I wouldn't open it. It would sit on my desk."
> "Don't you think the vinyl would look cooler mounted on your wall?"
> "But I can't play a vinyl!"
> "But the point isn't to play it. Everyone can get the CD. Who can get a vinyl?"
> "Hmmm...you have a point."

Turns out that the vinyl I bought is 1 of 1000. It was $35 at purchase. Watch it soar to at least $100 by the time it’s over or they’re all sold. Live distributed CDs and DVDs are the only things that jump to mind from CD land that appreciate in value like that, and they only retain value for as long as there are enough people that both understand the value and are willing to pay that premium. There are things that are so obscure that even the value and rarity of it is lost, and those things can actually sell for dirt cheap. In general, most other CDs depreciate in value to the point where they sell for just a few dollars. You walk into someone’s room and you see a row of CD’s and DVD’s and you think “he really is into collecting music”, but you’re not gonna really care if they open up each case and go through the booklet and show you the CD cover. You walk into someone’s room and they have a stack of vinyls from recent artists, and he starts going through and showing you the oversized booklets and the wacky designs on the surfaces, and it’s going to catch your attention more. I don’t know why, but it just does.

I already had a rule to not buy releases that are “easily accessible”. I get it digitally in the highest quality possible when I can because ultimately that’s how the files end up! I only purchase media that is not easily accessible like live distributed releases, limited edition CD+DVD combos where the DVD has some seriously exclusive footage (think TOUR09 by SCREW), mail-order releases, demos, etc. Vinyl is an extension of that, because it came back as a collector’s hobby and they don’t mass produce them.

I would never buy a vinyl with the intent of ripping it to my PC unless we have a Czechoslovakia by Boris situation, where there are exclusive vinyl tracks. Then I’d have to figure something out.

But that also brings me to my next point…

Both of these points are very valid and it makes me sad that I cannot refute them with logic and hopium! But ultimately, I positioned it in my brain as a collector’s item so bands should lean into it. Invert the thinking. Instead of pressing 1000 copies and hoping they sell, take the temperature of the water. Have people register with a name and a credit card, put a 1 cent holding charge on it to verify it’s legit (common practice), limit it to one per person. After a few weeks of open registration, charge everyone for the cost of pressing and shipping plus a tiny bit of profit, then press and ship the exact number of vinyls that were ordered. Only 582 people were interested? Only 582 are pressed then!

I get something beneficial out of this no matter what. If a lot of people aren’t interested then the vinyl is valuable and rare. If tons of people are interested, then maybe the bands will see that there is enough interest to continue with the strategy. None of us are competing with each other to get our vinyl copies. They can be numbered like the GAUZE vinyl to dissuade forgeries. They can lean into the visual aspects because the booklets that come with vinyls are big enough to appreciate the details. If they have leftover product, they can throw it in as a bonus!

There are people out there that paid $200+ for UROBOROS vinyl when it came out, so the market is there. It just needs a bit of cultivation.

If you have to use a service to drum up interest, do it! It’s not a negative to me so much as a way of doing business. The biggest issues to me is as you said cost and knowledge. It is not cheap to produce or buy vinyl, and you have to find engineers who know how to work with the medium to bring out it’s best qualities.

But from what I’ve seen so far, vinyl is cheapest when it comes out these days. That Streets of Rage vinyl is $35 today. How much do you think it will be worth a year from now? How much could you sell it for then? How much would you have to pay if you wanted a second copy a year later for whatever reason? That’s when you pay the premium.

I bet if the GazettE were to approach SONY and ask for a trial run of NINTH and MASS on vinyl with the strategy I mentioned earlier, SONY would have the connections and muscle to get the engineers, the materials, the connections, drum up hype, and then make good quality vinyls! Ruki was bragging about how you needed good headphones to appreciate the layers of DIVISION during the marketing phase, so getting the masters outta the vault is inconsequential. The potential for those albums to sound amazing are there.

All things considered, I’d be willing to pay $40-$60+ shipping for a limited edition of NINTH with a lenticular cover on red vinyl. Give it five years and I could flip it for thrice the cost, even if the wave doesn’t take off, specifically because it’s rarez.

And if you’re thinking “$40-$60 is way too cheap for vinyl, CD’s cost that much” consider what @ghost said about CD culture. It’s not that vinyl is more expensive; it’s more that we’re being overcharged for CDs…

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But that‘s a matter of money.
I can afford an album every now and then, not very often. I don‘t buy lots of other things others regularly do, I almost never eat in restaurants (pre-pandemic, I‘m not leaving my apartment for over a year, however everything gets more expensive, so that doesn‘t help money-wise) I don‘t go to the theater and so on. There‘s still barely money left. So how could I even invest in stuff like this. And basically that‘s the case for too many people in this world.

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We are on same boat. I was hyped while first listening and when wanted to check out opinions to share enthusiasm… Well, i was slightly surprised :smile:

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actually seeing Hankou Seimeibun on vinyl is a torturous tease words can’t do justice :sob::sob::sob:

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That’s perfectly valid. There was a long time where I just could not afford to buy CDs from my favorite artists. It’s actually how I cultivated the “rule” I mentioned in my previous post. I’ve actually begun buying stuff from Japan only recently (as in just a few months ago). Buying visual kei CDs are an expensive hobby even now, because the cost of shipping is just painful. This scene ran on goodwill even during the boom, because someone had to buy the CD to put everyone else on, so to speak. Things really haven’t changed in that regard either.

But I digress. That still doesn’t mean that they can’t do it. It just means that the demand is a fraction of what the demand for their CDs are, which is why I said it only makes sense for the biggest bands to pursue it. Instead of guessing how many people might be interested, have people sign up. Be transparent about the price ahead of time so people can budget. It can work.

Even in international waters, they don’t print a lot of copies of vinyl. I wasn’t dropping the number of copies of each pressed to show off (well maybe a bit ^_^) but to put some context around how few pressings there are for even established American artists. For more context: Spiritbox pressed about 20,000 copies of Eternal Blue on vinyl across all the different finishes (21,150 to be exact). That’s not a lot, and some are still available for purchase from their site. I bought Only for Dolphins by Action Bronson on vinyl for $60 and there are only 1000 copies of those. There’s another version that was sold out that had yellow vinyl instead of green, and that was 1000, and then another pink version that was 750. There are only 1000 copies of No Idols by Domo Genesis & The Alchemist.

So I’m under no impression that there would be any more than 1000 copies of any of these reprints, or that they would be cheap, or that they would even be practical. But they would be cool.

On a more practical tangent, the lifespan of an average CD is 25 to 50 years before it succumbs to bit rot. You need a special CD-R treated with phthalocyanine dye and a gold metal layer to get over 100 years. CD-Rs and audio CDs with that dye but a silver alloy metal layer cap out at 100 years and may only last 50. Literally anything else caps out at 50 years, with some forms of media only being good for 5 to 10 years. A vinyl can last for 100 years easily with good care under good conditions, and it can last up to 1000 years before it begins to decompose. Let’s be completely honest - most visual kei bands are not breaking the bank to make sure they get great quality CD-R’s. There are already CD’s from the 90’s that are quickly reaching their expiration date - and if they remain in those cases and they aren’t ripped and preserved digitally then someone is going to have a nasty surprise when they finally crack that case open and find a pristine CD with garbled, unreadable data on it. Ripping and preserving Japanese rarez digitally is going to be essential and I fear that by the time the scene “realizes” this we will have already lost quite a few things to bit rot.
We are essentially on the same page - physical CDs are nice but expensive and digital preservation is going to be the way forward. I’ve just reached a point where if I’m going to buy physical media of an artist, I only buy the CD if I have to. If I already have digital files, I’m opting for buying a vinyl or cassette as a collectors item (trivia: cassettes under good conditions can last for about 30 years). It just so happens that vinyls last longer than CDs under optimal conditions.
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Why doing something that requires a lot of effort (money, additional people and/or time etc.) when there‘s barely anyone caring about it just because one might be able to do it? We don‘t know the reasons behind it. We don‘t know how much of a say they have in it. Or how much they are interested in it. There are tons of possibilities, maybe thoughts about it but more reasons against then for it, maybe focus on other things that weren‘t possible because a day consists of 24 hours for everyone. People not getting younger but being known doesn‘t come first of course.
Getting at Gazette specifically, with Ruki saying that he recognized by his vocal condition in October when they had to postpone a live that he needs to learn to delegate to me pretty much is one reason to not even consider more things at least for now. And that‘s just a thing we are in the known about. We don‘t know anything about their personal situations (not speaking about Gazette exclusively anymore), what they have to deal with all the time and so on.

Unpopular opinion from me (I have that for a long time it just comes up my mind by the train of thoughts I‘ve been writing down just now):
Why do people always think they can expect so much from artists? Because that‘s how a lot of wording sounds to me. It often goes beyond „it were so great, if …“ but gets to some „they have to do this and that“, sometimes by direct phrasing, sometimes by words more subtle but long explanations that to me seem like a demand, because why do people analyze it to that point when it‘s just about some „it were so great, if …“.

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Visual kei in itself is something that requires a lot of effort for very little return because very few people care about it, especially now, yet new visual bands are still popping up.

I get that you don’t care about vinyl, but there are some people who do. Maybe not every fan of Dir en grey will rush to buy PHALARIS on vinyl if offered, but they certainly have enough fans even today to sell out most of the 12" vinyl of The World of Mercy while on tour - and whatever wasn’t there was sold on NeoTokyo and gone within an hour. One of those vinyls has not been resold ever. Ask @Missa how he feels about it. Making a Twitter poll to gauge interest does not take much effort.

Also, I am like 95% positive that the record label handles the details for pressing and distribution of their music on behalf of the artist, so figuring out all the details of pressing vinyl would be left to them. Maybe the band will make some decisions about how they want the cover, the booklet, or the vinyl to look like, but that’s about it. They’re not forging the materials for the vinyl by hand themselves.

Maybe they don’t do it because people haven’t expressed any interest…but this is me expressing interest in it! Someone has to start. And ultimately, this is an unpopular opinion and thus the perfect topic to express it!

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Yes vinyl vk! I wanna do some old school backmasking to some dir en grey :heart_eyes:

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On this topic - Personally, I don’t care for vinyls at all. Personally. I can barely afford CDs so that’s the boat I am on currently. (in fact, my CDs shelf reads as “devoting my life to 01 kpop group / I listen to some kpop / other stuff” but that’s only because there’s this ‘idol culture’ of purchasing albums so they can win awards and then exposing pretty albums bc ~ aesthetics ~ . My streaming service / mp3 folders are … entirely different.) I totally understand people who do, though, and there are some “deluxe” items that I rush to buy when I find them going for cheap / reasonable prices. It’s funny - the nostalgia that some folks seem to have for vinyls I have for laserdiscs and you can count on me to spend hours browsing those in antique shops and online stores even though I don’t have a player yet. So, I get collectors, I really do. Particularly if it’s a band you like a lot and they aren’t old enough to have released vinyls in the < 90s . Preservation is another good point IMO

But all of this brings me to my unpopular opinion again (the one about “isn’t visual kei minus visuals simply jrock/jmetal?”) - other than, obviously, the costs for pressing vinyl in Japan and the fact that only now “vinyl culture” seems to be gaining steam over there, I feel like western vk fans tend to focus on the music much more than the local community. Obviously - when all you have is the music (because there are huge cultural / linguistic / geographic bareers keeping you from the whole scene …) you either like that, or you … don’t. You can’t say “oh it’s because the lives are fun!” when all you have is 1 concert every 2 years or “oh it’s because I like this guy!” when it’s unlikely that you’ll have seen their scarce subbed interviews before listening to them. In its home country vk seems to be (or “have become again”) a very specific niche thing you know - (weird example but please bear with me) just like Japanese anime fans know that foreign anime fans exist and know the anime (products) those fans enjoy, if you talk to them about yaoi paddles, gaiaonline/4chan/MAL or certain specific titles (ahem, bible black) they’ll probably be like “???” because the experience of being an anime fan in the west is still different from being an anime fan in Japan u feel me ?? anyway, the thing is - vinyls are for music enthusiasts (as you gotta have a vinyl player at least) but I don’t know if … that many fans of vk bands in Japan are music enthusiasts in a broad way (broad enough to own a player or “get” the vinyl craze) . Did I make any sense?

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hi, it literally sold out while i was going through the checkout process with it in my cart. it’s been like two years and i’m still mad.

neotokyo burned my crops, slept with my wife, etc.

Anyhow, this chat inspired me to compile some of my worst DEG opinions and hot takes, since I have really strong feelings of love, annoyance, and exhaustion towards the band. I’ll bring more general J-Rock/VK hot takes another day but for now:

The outro on the Karasu remake is so bad that I suppress it from memory until I happen to hear it again. The unsettling weird-generic-JRock outro of the original pulls the song together much more effectively than a second-rate DSS climax.

On the topic of my mixed feelings of Unraveling, the original MACABRE is vastly superior IMO due to the production aesthetics. The lo-fi sound on that album stands in stark contrast to The Unraveling, so it’s a matter of preference there. Beyond that, though, I really don’t think the additional movement on the Remake does much to improve the song. I do like this remake, but it can’t beat the vibe and pacing of the original.

Remastered Uroborus is not that bad, and HYDRA-666- kinda fucks. On the topic of overhated remakes, Obscure remake>original Obscure. I kind of think the original is only popular because of the PV, but maybe I just had to be there at the time it released to really ~get it.~

While we’re at it, here’s a few beloved DEG songs that I would ruthlessly throw in the garbage: Clever Sleazoid, dead tree (literally the most unpleasant DEG song,) and The Inferno. If I was feeling particularly chaotic I’d throw Rasetsukoku in there too, but that song’s fine, if a bit overhyped for me. If the general fanbase likes any version of Bottom of the Death Valley, we can junk that one too.

I love this band enough to constantly keep up with them, be intimately familiar with basically all their work, etc., but they arguably never topped GAUZE as a whole work; especially if we’re talking about production. Not sure how hot of a take this one is on here (especially with our population of long-term VK fans,) but I, as well as most Western fans I talked to before diving into this scene, slept on this album compared to Uroborus or Withering.

Taiyou no ao is a classic, and DEG continually expose themselves as FRAUDS for abandoning it. Same for Pink Killer - gone from the setlists far too soon, living on only in our hearts and local files.

Is “Filth is their best single” a hot take? Probably not. I guess that’s all I’ve got for now. I’m sure I’ve got many more bad DEG takes that I’m less conscious of.

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And that‘s the point I‘m talking about.
Very few people do care and just very few people out of these very few people do care about vinyl. So why wasting time and money and stuff like this? Those who want to do, do. And the rest won‘t.

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