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Album of the Century - 100%
From their name to the long-winded titles of their songs and albums, to the lyrics in Japanese and the "Taihaisekai"-language, to their merging of half a dozen subgenres, to their lineup of three separate vocalists, to the mountain of instruments playing at any given time, Imperial Circus Dead Decadence is exactly the kind of musical clusterfuck I need in my life. When I discovered their previous EP I called it a "perfect album," because this style of music was such a revelation to my ears. Six years later, with the release of their newest full-length album, they have delivered what I could call, in good faith, the best thing ever.
I mentioned that this band combines genres. So what genres exactly feature on this album? Well, the archives list ICDD's genre as "symphonic power/melodic death metal." Which, if you need a simplified summary, is accurate. However, it doesn't cover their prominent influences from Japanese visual kei metal, specifically Dir En Grey. Furthermore, some songs feature tremolo-picked guitar sections that could feel at home in black metal or pig-squealed vocals that sound like they belong to a brutal death metal song. On top of that, their way of writing melodies and specific selection of instruments to sample in some of their songs invoke the conventions of gothic metal. Lastly, on this newest album, some deathcore influences have found their way into their sound. So we have a case of symphonic melodic blackened gothic visual kei power metal brutal deathcore. If that isn't the best thing you've ever heard, chances are you and I won't agree on many things.
To address the elephant in the room: Yes, this album does recycle four tracks from their previous two EPs. Do I choose to lower my rating because of that? No. All of those songs are certified bangers. 腐蝕ルサンチマン changed my life and may just be my favorite song ever, so I am going to do the opposite of complaining about its re-use on this album. If anything its recontextualization as part of a larger work elevates it, as well as the other three "recycled" songs. Especially Bring+Eyes=Death+Invite benefits from the new album structure, receiving an extremely satisfying lead-in from Pandemonic Night Parade.
When it comes to musical skill, everyone involved in this album is a master of their craft. I mentioned that ICDD's current main lineup features three vocalists. Well, aside from Rib:y(uhki), all the vocalists credited on this album, including two guest vocalists, are female. This means that if a song features no female vocals, as is the case for 獄, then everything you hear came out of the same guy. From the low growls to the high screeches to the clean singing, to the narration, to sounds for which I don't even have words to describe. Taking clear inspiration from Dir En Grey's Kyo, Yuhki contorts his voice into every imaginable shape, as well as some shapes that are entirely unimaginable.
Similarly to Yuhki's tour de force on vocals, Kim did one hell of a job on the guitars on this one. The melodic progressions in the riffs, solos, and leads are very neoclassical and extremely technical. Imagine Bach if he listened to Nile. Some songs have more quiet parts where the guitars either only lay down a few extended chords, or drop out entirely. Aside from that, it's a pretty nonstop assault with some pretty excellent guest performances by The Herb Shop and Yuto Iizuka.
The same is true for the drums, played by Shuhei Kamada. How good is he? Well, ICDD didn't have a drummer for their first seven years. All their early releases feature entirely programmed drums. I remember reading old comments like "Anyone can program drums that are impossible to play" referring to 黄泉より, which was originally released in 2014. So just how good is Shuhei? He can play 黄泉より. The version of the song on this album features recorded drums. He blasts beats like the best of them. One of my favorite death metal drummers, next to George Kollias.
Hull is the somewhat unsung MVP of ICDD. Unlike Yuhki, the "Master Prophet" of the Band, the frontman who takes center stage, in the literal and figurative sense, Hull seems to be more of a background character, even though his contribution to the sound of ICDD is arguably the biggest. He assists in composition, on earlier albums he played some of the guitars, he plays the bass, and, most importantly, he provides the "symphonic" in "symphonic melodic blackened gothic visual kei power metal brutal deathcore." Together with Yuhki's vocals, Hull's programming makes up the core of ICDD's identity. Signature techniques include mirroring the guitar melody with a harpsichord (or sometimes with an organ), call-and-response parts between guitars and strings, utilizing more instruments than would probably be necessary, and somehow putting a Xylophone and a Glockenspiel into a death metal song without it feeling out of place.
In terms of innovation over previous ICDD albums, this one makes the bold choice of featuring a track with entirely clean vocals and a BPM of under 200 in track 11, mode:α. Another point that stood out to me was the ending to the last track, 天聲. Most of the songs on this album, and in ICDD's discography in general, end either abruptly, or with unresolved melodic tension. In some cases both. This is why it's so interesting to me that 天聲 ends by not just perfectly resolving the melody, but by doing so in the cheesiest, most whimsical way possible. This death metal album, which features words for death, night, darkness, pain, and sadness in the titles of almost all of its tracks, ends like a Disney movie.
I think this sums up my feelings about this album pretty well. To me, it's the fairytale happy ending to six years of waiting for new music from one of my favorite bands of all time. It had high expectations to live up to and it met all of them. I hope the Imperial Circus stays in town for years to come and we get to hear many more pieces of deadly decadent music, but if they never release new music again, then this is a worthy last chapter.
The culmination of their past efforts, into one brilliant package - 100%
Imperial Circus Dead Decadence, or ICDD for short, are an eclectic 5-piece symphonic melodeath band from Fukuoka, Japan. They are known for having their songs being made into absurdly difficult charts and levels in rhythm games (those that allowed community made custom charts, at least). For a myriad reasons, they usually went unnoticed by most metalheads due to their oriental origins and audience-alienating sound (seriously, no one would bat an eye to a symphonic death metal that sounds like something straight out of a fantasy anime?). But despite that, they have gained a decent cult following precisely due to their sound.
After a few years of inactivity, ICDD revealed on twitter that a new album was in the works but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they had to delay its release and along with signing with osu! as a featured artist, this only further generated hype for this album. Even though I am a long time fan for almost a decade and had high expectations for the album, what ICDD ended up delivering did not just live up to the hype, but ended up shattering my expectations (in a good way). Due to the album's long name, I will just shorten the name to merely "Mogari" since that is how the first kanji is pronounced in romaji.
The album begins with a triumphant choir and chanting before leading into the main riff and narration, which sets up the story of the album which I unfortunately cannot understand due to my limited Japanese and the amount of Japanese equivalent of Shakespearean English/their own made up language dubbed "Taihaisekai" utilized in the album. The first track is a bright, colourful and power metal-esque song that will not sound out of place in a Versailles album even with the amount of harsh vocals being utilized, but the bridge of the first track takes a drastic turn when everything stops and goes into straight death metal riffing and a breakdown, before a solo and a triumphant reprisal of the opening riff and chorus, before ending the song on a high note.
And that is when the album becomes a proper melodeath album, the vocals getting increasingly unhinged (even the clean vocals), the songs gets increasingly darker and more brutal, and songs starting to have a surprise at the end (looking at you track 10), saving for track 9 which is a pretty weird track even in a vacuum, much less in an album (maybe this is a deliberate throwback to track 6 in their 2011 album?). And then track 10 hits, establishing a completely different atmosphere and vibe compared to the previous 8 tracks (yes 8, track 1 sounds different from 2-9).
I originally thought track 10 was a cheesy epic melodeath/power metal track because it was introduced in their 2013 EP as the first song and hence all the impact was lost on me, but after listening it here, I finally understand why it was written that way: It is to contrast the previous 8 songs while keeping their brutality and dark sound, while slowly marking a sadder, more melancholic direction the album will take in tracks 10-13, and sure enough, track 11 is a power ballad with a really sad sounding atmosphere, while track 12 is a mirror track to 11 and sounds like the antithesis to 11, hence a more deathcore/angrier sound. And then we come to the final track (track 13), which is a straight up power metal track, but as a culmination of all the previous 12 tracks, including incorporating the guitar solo in track 6 and the lyrics of track 3, with a very special surprise in the end, marking the end of an album full of twists and turns.
Unlike many (but not all) symphonic extreme metal bands from recent memory, the production on the album is stellar, nothing stood out too much and robbing the spotlight, and everything sounds like where they should be, creating a wall of noise, brutality and harmony. For the instrumentals, they are not as technical as one might think like Fleshgod Apocalypse (I do not know why they are on top of the similar artist list, they share the same genre but sounds radically different, especially when Fleshgod's 2011 album ended up having a really horrible production that made any instrument besides the drums buried in the mix), but they are at where they should be, and that is all that matters (although almost every song has a solo and they sound phenomenal, special props to Kim, the lead guitarist who came up with the solos).
The songwriting here is great too, since the tracks really sound like a story told in 13 chapters, and ICDD did it in a way that does not sound redundant or boring (which melodeath is often guilty off, being a genre mostly populated by ATG copycats), having many tracks that often exceeding 6 minutes and rarely repeats its parts, and those that did mostly serve as a cathartic reprisal, also the breakdowns are definitely some of the best I've heard in metal as a whole.
I also think I have to make a paragraph just for the drums, since the drums on this album sounds different from most melodeath bands. The drums here sounds more like they belong to a goregrind/brutal death metal album, and this is exactly what I wanted from melodeath bands, more often than not melodeath bands ended up using really basic drum beats that really diluted the death metal part of the song and this might have contributed to death metal fans' disdain for melodeath, meanwhile Mogari utilizes BDM/Goregrind drumming like having a lot of blastbeats and sections that blazes past 200 BPM (the 10th track begins with a drumroll then jumps into a long 220 BPM blastbeat section as the vocalist screams his lungs out like a lunatic).
For the vocals, I think Rib:y(uhki) did an extremely stellar job when it comes to delivering the vocals, especially given the range he utilized in the album, it encompasses from vocal techniques like low growls, high shireks, pig squeals, and even something straight out from Infant Annihilator's Dickie Allen's vocal cords in a short section in the 4th track. And all this is before we mention his clean singing, he can front a power metal band with his clean singing, and due to his unique oji-san-esque (that's uncle for y'all who do not speak Japanese) speaking/clean singing voice, he can carve out a niche in the oversaturated power metal scene if he wants to, for all we know. Honestly RIb might be the next contender for the most versatile vocalist after Dir En Grey's Kyo and Mike Patton from Faith No More/Mr. Bungle, due to the sheer amount of range he has and how he can utilize his vocals in the most unorthodox ways.
Special mention has to be made for the female vocalist, Akira, the sound of the album would not be what it is without her, even when her vocal appearances being not as often and prominent as Rib, but her vocals were utilized at where it would matter most and it did made the impact it was intended to be.
For the symphonics/orchestral arrangements, one thing I had a gripe about the band previously was that the orchestral elements felt very buried in the mix and hard to listen to without headphones. I'm glad that fixed that problem, since with the symphonic/orchestral elements being pushed forward in the mix made the songs in the way more enjoyable.
Long time fans might notice that tracks 3, 6, 7, and 10 are also featured on the previous 2 EPs, and they rerecorded them for this album, and its a good thing they did, since tracks 10 and 7 originally had programmed drums, and the inclusion of actual drums made the songs sound better and more organic, enhancing the impact it has (track 6 had some of its blast beats BEING REPLACED BY FULL BLOWN GRAVITY BLASTS FFS)!, meanwhile they made track 5 a Siamese twin song to pair with track 6 which is also a plus. Only track 3 feels identical to the original 2016 incarnation, but it is a phenomenal track on its own so all is good.
Overall, its a 10/10 album, and deserves to be the AOTY for 2022 (it was certainly my AOTY), and I recommend anyone who like metal in general to listen to this album, it incorporates so many genres and made previously inaccessible aspects of metal music accessible to non-metalheads.
Tracks to recommend: 1, 10, 5+6, 13
Tracks to avoid: none, but 4 is the worst track (even then it's still a good track)
FFO: Any metal music besides maybe doom and drone subgenres