After a good month of thoroughly listening to Arche, I was very pleased with Dir en grey reaching new heights with their music. It's definitely lighter sounding than their previous albums and more upbeat, but still holds the usual complexity and grim atmosphere. There is still a lot of hardcore sounding elements in their songs, Dir en grey certainly hasn't abandoned for a softer image.
I haven't looked up the translations for lyrics and I don't typically do so. The reason being that I want to absorb the music entirely before applying meaning to it. Based on the released PVs and some translated news, I get the impression that Arche is about the origin of pain or something along those lines. Their album cover is very interesting. To me it looks like a ginseng-like root shaped like a pregnant woman. Immediately I think birth and possibly connecting with the idea of birth/origin of humanity bring pain. The lyric video for "Kuukoku no kyouon" gave me a lot of ideas for that. Juxtaposing the images of flowing water with war and poverty was a huge contrast trying to shatter the tranquility of life. I suppose "Kuukoku no kyouon" (Footsteps in the Empty Valley) could mean the loneliness humanity will face when the world is ravaged through war and conflict.
Now "Revelation of mankind" had me doing a lot of guesswork. The video shows a typical happy family disrupted with a deranged and obsessed killer of some sort who mimics a murder performed in one of Dir en grey's previous PVs. He also convinces the children to torture their own parents. So there's this reference to old work and maybe a call out to fanatics that will do anything to make certain things come true. Kind of reminded me of Eminem's "Stan". I said a happy family, but there was an act of domestic violence so I got confused right there. I'm thinking maybe this all took place in his head and hasn't really happened. Or perhaps it actually did. Towards the very end, the video of the murder was put online, but there were comments on it pointing it be fake blood and props. Maybe the revelation of mankind is how people respond to information released on the Internet, claiming what is true and what is not and believing in these claims. So until I get a hold onto an official translation, I have no idea what is really going on and I'm just rambling on.
I think there was a lot of variety in the album. My favorite songs were Phenomenon, Uroko, Soshaku, Chain Repulsion, and revelation of mankind.
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