Gold
Sun and Silver Moon?!
now
playing: Marilyn Manson's Holy Wood (2000)
Got
a haircut the other day; I've got job interviews to go to! $60 gets
you a nice cut, coffee, a head massage (oh don't be dirty!), shampoos
before and after, and that's it.
The
magazines they've got include some that are just page after page of
headshots; the one I flipped through during my two-minute wait (I
didn't make an appointment, but I went early in the day and so had
the place to myself) had how-to cuts and stylings for Hyde and Tetsu,
Shinya (the Dir en grey one), Kirito, and some other chaps (from Laputa
and La'cryma Christi, maybe).
And
an hour after that I had a nice short disgusting cut! Bleah! No pictures
of me yet, but I am going out to Rob's concert tonight, so i'll get
some there no doubt!
I
also hit one of those Claire's Boutique places, for some fake lip
rings, and the girl there even spoke English so it was easy. They
had no fake lip rings, so she said, "See these cheap earrings?"
(They were $4 metal loops.) "I can use this on them!" (She
produces a tiny plier-type device.) She seemed quite the pro, so I
said what the hell, and she snipped off the thin hinge bit and popped
the lip ring on. It looked like it might jab me, but it didn't hurt
at all; it just kinda sits there, held in place by my luscious pouty
lips <smooch>!
And
it looks real enough on there; although already I think i'm going
to buy a more legitimate ball-style one (not testicle-style, perv,
just the kind that's made of a thicker loop, with a little ball-bearing
on the loop)! So I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to give
it a shot without punching a permanent hole in their faces. Already
I'm also thinking of re-piercing my ears again (they holes all sealed
up long ago)... although I have to do it myself -- at Clair's, for
example, they don't do it at all. You have to buy the device adn go
home and do it! And the device looks like a little dollar-store cigar-end-cutter-offer
device, only with a sharp golden needle instead of a cigar-sized guillotine
on it. And I don't ~think~ I want to show up at a job interview with
blood and puss oozing from a self-inflicted earring wound.
And
damn, I haven't really much of a review to offer you on those jrock
discs I bought last weekend...
The
Syndrome discs cover the whole spectrum; the first one I opened, their
latest single, Fiction, is a bit technoy/remixy. Four tracks
and not much in the way of guitarwork at all. Had I made a mistake
buying so much by them?! Nope. Nostalgia, an earlier single
(with two instrumental tracks and two "real" tracks, "Nostalgia"
and "Realize") was pretty good. track 3, "Realize"
has some fun dueling-guitar song construction going on, and the instrumental
for "Nostalgia" have some grooves that don't surface so
clearly in the original version, competing with the vocal line as
they do. Syndrome is on my must-see list. Not the heaviest jrock band
i've heard by a long shot, but solidly in the cool/heavy vein of visual
kei that I like.
Their
5-track EP, which has a two-kanji title (the second kanji is "King",
maybe... anyway, it's a very ~green~ release, if that helps!) is quite
cool. Several cool songs of varying hardness, nice and dynamic (clean
parts, heavy parts, mid-tempo bits, fastyfast bits)... "Deep
Sky" featured some particularly memorable melodies. "Slaeves"
is a harder, though it still starts with that jangly-clean-guitar-on-top-of-heavy-riffing
that is the hallmark of visual kei nowadays... and then there's the
section of the song that will definitely be the "10-minutes-audience-participation"
section when you see them live... complete with "Kyo-style"
vocals ("Grrr, i'm a baby lion roaring! Rawr rawr rawr!!")
Janna
Da Arc's 12-track album DNA, which came out last year and includes
singles for "Red Zone" and that "Eden" song (with
the video that scares the bejesus out of you with the singer's Kimi
ga blah blah blah! in your face) is good too, though there's no
lion-roaring! It's technical, complicated, and very prog-metal flavored,
but also "over-produced" or something; the songs -should-
be very cool, but they aren't, for some reason. On an individual basis,
the writing is great, the performances superb, the packaging attractive...
but something is missing; I'm not getting out of my seat and air-guitaring
to them or banging my head to the beat.
Probably
it's due to the fact that I'm used to the more intense Dream Theater
style. But if you find DT too much work at this point in your musical
fandom, you might like Janna; they're a nice stepping stone from the
simpler bands that everyone starts out liking to the more complex,
layered bands that some fans eventually go onto discover. Or not,
what the hell do I know! :)
S
seems like a cool band, but I've heard better. And their guitars all
sound like they cranked the bass and treble and took out the midrange;
hollow and meatless, and to make matters worse, they're flanged or
wah-wah'd half the time (go to your local guitar shop and ask to hear
a flanger; you've heard the sound before, I'm sure. It's hard to effectively
explain on paper, but let's just say it's cool in moderation, and
S is not known for moderation. Oh, or listen to any Metallica solo
by Kirk -- he's ALWAYS soloing with a wah! The solo to Enter Sandman
comes immediately and irritatingly to mind. Waoh waoh waowhhh!) And
the songs could be better to, really. Although to be fair. Track 4,
"xxx, S" has promise. Maybe with Janna Da Arc's producers
they coulda been yummier. One step in the right direction for S would
to be to NOT record at "Eggs and Shep Studios" again, I
imagine...
Then
there's Merry Go Round, who have an EP called S, which I always
saw and went, "Ooh, S! Oh, wait, damn, no its not!" So that
wasn't such a good start for the band. But the 7-track EP, from 1998,
wasn't half bad. But i can't remember any of the songs from it.
It
did have a bit of a raw edge which some of ya's may like... also,
since it's from 1998, it's cheap, because three years ago might as
well be three decades ago in the Land of J-Rock. (I bought this CD,
finally, after numerous sightings of it at used outlets, because a
band-wanted ad Rock Indies in Shinjuku had a singer whose three topbands
were "Dir en grey, Merry Go Round, Madeth Gray'll". Good
company, so for $4.50, they seemed worth a shot. But, eh <shrugs>.
I think maybe, a couple years ago, they were really cool, but now
everyone is like them! (Although, I think it's growing on me... i
wanna listen to it again now...)
Psycho
le Cemu, on the other hand, leaves quite a cool impression. Just visually,
they're intense. One's all smurf-blue, for starters, and another one's
Hulk-green, all over. They're hard to miss. Their most recent single,
for Remembrance, has them looking much less anime-style, but now they're
in high school uniforms (and not all of them are boy's uniforms).
The songs are well composed and have some great sounds on 'em; "Remembrance"
is pop-flavored but still hard enough to be j-rock and not j-pop.
The
second track on the single is miles heavier, and has some funky jams,
but not too funky (I hate funk). Just catchy, and with some nice old-school
palm-muted single-line verse riffs that I dig. The drums are nice
and all over the place as well, not boring 1!, 2, 3, 4; 2!, 2, 3,
4 style. The vocalist, I'd probably say, is the weakest element, although
he's quite good; just, i dunno, his voice is "round"...
not jagged like Kyo's. Track 3 is a bit too slow and Vegas-sounding,
if you ask me, but I have to admit, it has a cool feel to it... kinda
Led Zep-ish, barely... kinda... slow and moody, spacey... or is it
just long and boring?
Oh,
and the Raphael single for "Lilac" I got for Y180 is just
cool, but everyone knows Raphael, so no need to explain!
The
Marilyn Manson albums I got (finally, I bought Antichrist Superstar
and Holy Wood) are cool too. That lad's a fine lyricist, ain't
he? "Dear God, if you were alive, I'd kill you"? Touche!
<golf clap!>
