I think tagging classical scared me off the genre haha I'm fairly OCD about things. I probably should finish sorting my FLAC rips. As silly as it sounds, I have Japanese music and western music completely separated.


Hopefully that one will reach you soon - it'll be worth the wait.

Man, the last few weeks have SUCKED for bands I like - its like band members are dropping like flies. Albion's guitarist just announced her departure, Mahatma's keyboardist just left, Tenrin's guitarist departed (became a dad), and Crying Machine's drummer left. Windzor (another female-fronted band over there I like) lost their keyboardist and bassist too. Ganglion's bassist left due to health reasons - fucking sucks, because she was one of my favorite bassists over there.


Not metal and only the first half is the actual PV (2nd half is just the song repeated with different visuals). I love the bass-tone on this.


Nearly everything I bought I like to one degree or another, but I've had a few mistakes. Blasdead I didn't care for much, and Eleanor didn't do much for me. I managed to sell both on ebay quickly. Its very rare when I find a Japanese band with a female vocalist I don't care for. I guess Area51 and Inspire did nothing for me.


I wouldn't mind hearing that as well. They did re-record one song from it ("Awaken"). And "Coming of Age" was a re-recording of a compilation track. I wouldn't mind hearing the original, but it'd be too much of a pain to track down.


I prefer the original as well - mainly due to the music. There's some really epic part (around the 4 min mark I think) that's absent from the re-recording.


I think there were some complaints about Yuri's vocals too. She sounded great to me. I guess they wanted her to keep singing in that super high pitch like she did on the single.

Man, that band is in trouble. I hope they can find replacement members soon. Oh well, if Destrose can endure multiple lineup implosions, I'm sure Albion can too. Mary's Blood had their line-up implode too, but rebuilt itself stronger than ever too. Actually 3/4ths of their current lineup used to be in Destrose. They actually have their major label debut coming soon - totally looking forward to that. This is a short PV clip - I hope they release the entire thing soon. I already have that song on their "Azure" MCD though. Hopefully the remix isn't as brickwalled as that version. And in case you liked that one, here's an older full song.


I'm not really sure if I'm anywhere near the point to start listening to foreign podcasts just to find some bands, but I'll let you know in a few months. [/quote]
I listen and pray I pick up some of the language via osmosis Yeah right, if that was the case then every weaboo would be perfectly fluent in Japanese.


Indeed. Those tribute things are mostly for fun and whatnot. Good opportunity for bands to get practice in a live setting too. Its strange how close she was to the audience though - they get totally close up and personal there.


Fuck yes! I'd like to see them do more Japanese-titled songs. The reworking of that song on the Kizuna EP was pretty nice too (it doesn't have the thrash parts though).

There's no real standard for tagging Classical music, so you have to come up with your own hacked-together thing and it's terrible. I have a couple of classical collections (Stravinsky and William Walton) that I don't really listen to that often (especially not these days), but tagging these was hellish endeavor.

Can't say I see any purpose in separate Japanese and Western music myself (it all goes in the obligatory “Music” folder), but whatever floats your boat.


Mahatma's “Time Is” and Gargoyle's “Natural” are still on backorder, ugh. At least HMV ships really, really fast. Hopefully, I'll get it next week.


Oh Jesus, that is really horrible. Hopefully stuff will work out, but it sucks seeing band members leaving like that (unless it's a band I really don't like ).


Now that's how you play bass. That's some pretty sweet bass tone right there. There's a really good groovy feel to the song too.


Same for me. I've struck out on a couple of Taru's (k-pop artist) latter albums though which was actually really disappointing. Her work while “The Melody” was together and her debut, self-titled solo album were both really damn good.


I was pretty damn impressed with her vocals. The song on the PV didn't leave much of an impression on me in terms of vocals, but the other tracks on the album did. My favorite part has got to be whatever song it was with the really brief section where Yuri does some awesome high-pitched wailing. Wouldn't have mind if they repeated that once, but whatever.


I agree that the production job on the PV clip isn't so great. The music was great though and so was the older song.


All I can do is recognize the obvious phrases, but not much beyond that. Osmosis doesn't seem to work real well.


Yeah, she was well within intimate range of the audience members .


Huh, the thrash parts were my favorite parts of the song too. Well, I plan to get some of Galneryus's Eps one of these days, but I should probably just listen to their albums more. Some of them, I haven't really played that much. Been consuming music a lot faster than I normally do lately. I'm usually a slowpoke at these things. Guess, that's why it took me like 2 years to finally get around to getting Galneryus's albums.

I guess for all intents and purposes, it functions as my "current listening" folder. Unfortunately, my other folders I stopped midway through organizing a year and a half ago and its all a mess. I really should go back and finish that - maybe my burnout has relented a bit to actually play some of that stuff.

I'm pretty OCD with Japanese lettering too (well, any foreign language, really). I hate romaji tags. Man, its really bad when you get a CD all in Japanese and can't find a tracklisting online. One CD of mine I had to open up a word document and insert symbols - pain in the ass, esp. since my eyesight sucks and that stuff is hard to read.


Backorder sucks. I have 4 orders tied up by backordered items. I may cancel all the backordered items eventually and put them all together into a new order. I should have some goodies arriving in the mail tomorrow - including Light Bringer's "Midnight Circus". Hopefully its in good shape and customs left that package alone.


I don't know if this is the norm over there, or I just picked a really bad time to follow bands. I know there's lineup changes all the time, but this seems a bit extreme.

Hopefully we'll get some good news with new bands and whatnot. Another thing I notice is there's more health-related withdrawals over there (esp. with girls). I guess they do have more environmental concerns over there.

Marina (ex-Destrose) I think is making an announcement tomorrow - hopefully it'll be some good news.


Now that's how you play bass. That's some pretty sweet bass tone right there. There's a really good groovy feel to the song too. [/quote]
Ganglion is my favorite non-metal girl band over there (hell, maybe favorite non-metal band over there period). All instruments are pretty good, but the bass stood out a lot to me. Whoever their new bassist is (she's going to be revealed at their next gig), has big shoes to fill. Since their stuff is bit of a pain in the ass to find on youtube (due to getting mixed up with cysts), here's a few other songs:

Over this Wall (Live) - really nice bass here and proves they can pull this shit off live.

Catch your way (short version) - couldn't find the full version on youtube. My favorite song by them. Pity they didn't bother putting the full video up. They've been hanging around Destrose too much.

Koga (Gacharic Spin/Doll$boxx) is probably the best female bassist over there, but I think I like Yui just as much. Fin (Re:Maker/LionDigitaLiz/etc) is another one I like a lot. She was Albion's support bassist last year when Shoko went down with an injury of some sort. Here's her covering some Masaki Project song (some Japanese bass virtuoso). I'm no expert, but I'm guessing this isn't easy to do.


I'm amazed I haven't ran into more crap than I have. Normally when I start mining underground bands, the good to shit ratio worsens. I'm finding they have a lot of good, promising underground bands over there. I used to actually avoid self-released albums (mainly cuz most of the ones I came across sucked hard), but I can't do that anymore. I'm sure if I jumped into other genres, I'd find some stuff I don't like. Like some girl-bands like The Leaps and Crea were totally out of my comfort zone and didn't do much for me. I didn't like Silent Siren either.


She belted out a few good high notes in that PV (almost surprised me actually), but she shined elsewhere on that album more. Man, I hope they can rebuild their line-up. I'm almost dreading checking my twitter account to see what bad news shows up on there. I guess bands like A Drop of Joker renewed their lineup after losing 3 members, so I should be more optimistic. Things also probably seem more "dire" because I'm following things a lot closer than usual (I kinda have to, since Japanese music doesn't get much attention over here).


I'm curious to see what Mary's Blood new material will be like - they do have some proggy tendencies (I know their guitarist likes jazz fusion... and... uhhh J-pop lol). Definitely one to look forward to this summer or so. Exist Trace should have a new one out soon too, unfortunately, they seem to be getting lighter and poppier for whatever reason.


You'd never see that over here. I didn't notice any security either. I guess their audiences are lot more polite/civil than over here. Japanese women seem to be really fucking extroverted too (definitely at least compared to female frontwomen over here). Almost every single one I've seen - including new/unsigned bands - has stage presence. Weird... something in the drinking water


That EP is definitely worth getting - there's a couple exclusive songs on it ("Winning the Honor" is awesome), and a couple re-recordings. The Korean version actually has an extra track for whatever reason.

Organization will save you a lot of pain in the long run. I remember having a ton of poorly tagged mp3's with corrupt metadeta (curse you ID3!) that I had to run a bunch of commands on to fix. Thank goodness I'm sensible enough to use FLAC/Vorbis metadata tags instead.


Romaji tags suck; maybe it's just OCD or something, but there's never just one, consistent way to handle it, so I never do it (with a couple of exceptions though). A good example would be Gargoyle's “あめえば　らいふ.” Just writing that directly into romaji would give you, “Ameeba Raifu.” But really, they probably just meant “Amoeba life” there. But then why did they use Hiragana instead of Katakana since those are foreign words? And why “me” instead of “mo?” I know it's really silly to care much about it, but just that one song would bother me forever if I tried to put that in romanji. I just leave it alone.

At the moment, I use romaji for bandnames (most Japanese bands don't have Japanese names funnily enough). I prefer to have my library in alphabetical order, and foreign characters obviously break that. Also, anything with official western releases usually have romanji in the CDDA, so I just leave that there since it is “official.” (I might change my mind on this later, but we'll see.) And for the sake of sanity, I leave the folder names for albums in romanji too, but the actual tags are in kanji/katakana/hiragana.

Oh, and Japanese characters really make me glad that I spent the time to make my font rendering all nice. Granted, Kanji is hard as hell to see no matter what you do, but Hiragana and Katakana look rather pretty on my computer.


Well, now I'm just waiting on Gargoyle's “Natural.” (It's a CD-R, on demand actually, but there's not much you can do about it.) I'm kind of tempted to get the copy that recently popped up on discogs though, but I know it'll take even longer to ship (and it costs more). But it is an actual pressing, I'm not sure how much I care about that.


It does seem kind of normal for band members to fly in and out over there, but that does seem rather extreme. I think it's just really bad luck.


That's some really radical tapping there on the last track. I never really played a string instrument, but I can assure you that's not easy.

Ironically enough, despite listening to a lot lighter music these days, I've been listening to more metal not less. I've been meaning to get more into jrock stuff, but I haven't gotten around to it. I should though, I know it's great.


I'm certain there's plenty of bubblegum-esque poppy idol stuff that I'm better off without too. Right now, Japan does seem to have an extremely high good to shit ratio as far as rock and really melodic metal stuff goes. It's certainly better than anything else I'm aware.


Which is funny because Japanese society is introverted as hell (and also soul-crushing, but that's another story). The people there are polite as hell (probably too polite actually), so it's really not surprising when I think about it.

I used to be really organized with my files - not sure what happened. Maybe I'll get things cleaned up this weekend. As odd as it sounds, I don't bother with media libraries (like the one foobar uses) - I tend to go through directories and do it manually. I think I'm still butthurt that the last time I tried setting up a playlist (for Onmyo-Za's singles), it randomly got deleted or overwritten or something. I really need to organize their folder actually. I have 30 folders there, and its really confusing, esp. since its all in Japanese. Hell, I still refer to their albums by the release date or what the album cover looks like. Totally disorienting, actually.


For tags, I don't but romanji in the album or band name, but for the actual folders, sometimes I do. Like mixing up 陰陽座 and 天狗櫻 would be pretty easy for me to do (Onmyo-Za and Tengusakura, respectively). This stuff is an absolute nightmare for stuff like last.fm. I do my best, but I'm past the point of caring I don't think getting worked up over something where I'm like 1 of 5 people worldwide scrobbing it is the end of the world.


My orders arrived today and that Light Bringer was in great shape, thank fuck. That 時空海賊 Seven Seas's booklet/obi strip were in subpar condition, but the CD was in great shape. And that's what matters, really. I just hope it rips fine. Considering how rare it is, and that I got it for 1000 yen (before fees), I'm not going to whine. I may actually have to swallow my OCD and learn to accept a few scratched CDs. This stuff is pretty hard to find decent quality rips of as well (all transcoded trash or shit bitrates).

The rest of the stuff I'll have to chip away at over the weekend. That Los Child I nailed for pretty cheap (its OOP)... shit, I got all obsessed about getting that one and I don't even know if its any good I think the price was lowered because the jewelcase had some cracks in it (it was still shrinkwrapped). That was easy enough to fix.


Yeah, I hope its coincidence. I never noticed that happening too much over here, but I never followed things this closely. Oh, Marina announced a new band/project. It sounds a lot like... you guessed it.. Destrose! The ever-ubiquitous Hibiki does bass on this.



And Destrose already found a replacement vocalist, which will be announced in June. Ibuki (Art of Gradation) is doing support live vocals for them, I think. Not sure if I'd want her being their full-time vocalist (I don't think she fits). Mind you, Art of Gradation doesn't exactly demand a shrieky vocalist or anything.

Gotta say, they sure work fast. But chances are this was all figured out way ahead of time.


Fin is like a female Hibiki. Pity she isn't in a metal band or whatever. Mind you, Re:MAKER was close. Actually not sure what genre that band falls in. Vocaloid experimental electro j-pop/j-rock/j-metal. Pretty spacey/psychedeleic too. Nice bass and guitar work too (Saki from Mary's Blood plays in this).


I think blundering into J-rock just happened for me. Its kinda an ajunct to metal over there anyway. Like a lot of metal bands tour with rock bands. Concert-billings over there are pretty crazy, actually. Like, there was a recent one where Ganglion played with Gyze (melodeath) and Knights of Round (power metal). Mind you, I own CDs by all those bands, so maybe its not so weird after all. Those bands all get along really good too. D_drive and Gacharic Spin seem to tour with everyone too. Shit, probably Light Bringer at one point too. I think they had a show with Gargoyle once.


For me, it usually has to have rock instrumentation (guitar/bass/drums/etc) and have a high degree of competence. So, dipping into j-rock/j-pop isn't that big of a deal to me. If there's no actual instruments, bleh, screw that crap. I wouldn't mind dabbling in some electronic stuff, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for, so I kinda gave up.


They sure seem to have a good time at concerts, at any rate. Going by the lives I've watched, there seems to be a higher emphasis on fun. Mind you, with power metal and j-rock, that's really not that huge of a shock.

Yep, I do the exact same thing. Unless the name is really simple (like Misogi), it's identification by album covers or release date for me. It does get confusing on my portable device though. I can't scroll through pretty album art, so I have to squint at these funky symbols on this tiny resolution screen and take a guess. Let's just say I usually mess up.


Oh Jesus. I'm also really thankful that Japanese bands tend to stick to not-Japanese names so I can actually pronounce them on the off chance somebody asks what I'm listening too. I wish they could fix their language, but apparently they have a million homophones hence the funky runes for everything.


Yeah, I saw that in the purchase thread. Really nice stuff. You're making wish I didn't have the income of a just a part-time worker and college student. Had to pay for a state inspection on my car earlier today, and I thought to myself, “Damn that's a couple of Japanese albums right there.”


That's pretty good. Hibiki involved is never a bad thing.


Haha, ridiculously long genre names never fail to amuse me.

I've been appreciating bass more and more these days, and so does Japan apparently. Hell, Toshi's godly basslines are a major reason why I think Gargoyle is so fucking good. I don't think there's another thrash metal out band there you could listen to for just the bass. The man is almost 50 now and he can play circles around most bassists. I suppose that Toshi and Hibiki are currently locked in an intense death match for my favorite bassist right now.


I've sort of stumbled in and out at various points. Randomly, I'd buy a Dir En Grey album or something along those lines. Never truly got into (I should though). But yeah, the rock isn't far off from metal at all, and that's certainly not a bad thing.

Also, a concert with both Light Bringer and Gargoyle sounds like something out of a dream.


I can't do full-on electronic either. I'm perfectly fine with wacky, crazy synthesizer wankery and acid special effects, but once the actual instruments disappear, it just don't work for me anymore. I've only heard a handful of 100% electronic songs I could truly say I liked.


It'd be pretty hard not to have fun. They definitely like epileptic light shows and glowsticks for whatever reason. It's a little odd seeing the crazy glowsticks in both poppy idol shows and really heavy stuff though.