But most of the comments are people bickering about rock and metal... :/
I'm not seeing any bickering, really. Mainly folks sharing their favorite sounds out of Japan. Love seeing folks being passionate about rock/metal, and also seeing a lot of names I've not encountered myself. I don't know that I'll ever have the time to check them all out, unfortunately, especially with literally hundreds of other albums I'd like to spin at some point in my life.
Stuff I do know about is Galneryus which were mentioned previously but I'd like to mention them again since they're pretty much the flagship of Japanese power metal, Desecravity, Intestine Baalism, Kyojin Daigyakusatsu, I cannot believe I forgot Ningen Isu... hm... been a while since I have heard any new Japanese music, really. I'll also recommend guitar player Masaaki Kishibe to any fan of fingerstyle guitar, one of the absolute best. I also know that neoclassical/shred/virtuoso rock/metal has been big in Japan to varying degrees for a good while, Michael Angelo Batio and Marty Friedman I specifically recall being huge over there.
To be completely honest, let me go on a little bit of a tangent myself: Japanese music in all forms is very uniquely flavored, to say the least, and there are a lot of acts with a lot of personality, for better or worse, and even the approach to (more) mainstream music writing can at sometimes be baffling to me, my greatest example would be what I believe is the opening theme for Release the Spyce, pretty awesome show by the way, which is a preppy-happy pop/rock tune (with uncharacteristically animated drum work,) that at some point bursts into a double-kick line and then into a goddamn blast beat, and it fucking works, for some reason! I find it incredibly interesting how the outside-the-box music structuring and composition are compared to western pop music's songwriting.
But one of the reasons that my musical sphere of influence doesn't reach Japanese music as much nowadays is that it is an absolute urethral needle to properly tag and catalog, which is something very important to me. By tag and catalog, I mean having the proper name of the band, proper name of their releases, proper track order, etc., and exactly because of the aforementioned unique flavor, there are a lot of bands with randomly capitalized names, completely nonsensical names, or names with goddamn emojis in them and it can be absolute goddamn ass to track and tag, especially if you're using something like Last.fm like I am, and on top of it all, there aren't many discography lists that are consistent in the information shown and stuff. It's a lot more prominent in pop music than in rock or metal - I'm a big fan of Yanagi Nagi (or Nagi Yanagi, however you'd prefer,) for instance, and the various listings of her discography, their inconsistencies, and lack of anything 'official' have made it very hard for me to track it and tag it properly throughout the years. Rant end. Goddamn, it feels good to get this out of my system.
last edited at May 10, 2022 8:33AM