November 2015 Music Pick

 
This month has some heavy tastes and I threw in a wild card just for fun.

Dogma - the GazettE

To be honest, I was disappointed with the GazettE's last album, Beautiful Deformity. I got tired of listening to their album within a month. If you happen to skip that album, I wouldn't say that you missed anything. The time that I was listening to Beautiful Deformity, they released a teaser for Dogma showing snippets of each song. Surely enough, these snippets got me hooked and I was debating whether I should give Dogma a try. I have to say that the illustration they used for the packaging was great. It reflects the dark ominous sound that is trademark to the GazettE. I hear a lot of angst and uneasiness yet not so much of the depressing and melancholy ballads. It's very heavy compared a lot of their previous work and a lot more on the metal side than hard rock. Dogma flows much better than their last three works.

S.E.A.M. -01 - Plastic Earth 

I was initially notified about the existence of this album when someone said Die, our beloved guitarist of Dir en grey, did back up vocals for track 5 of this album. Strangely enough, I kind of dig this album despite its terribly written lyrics. This melodic death metal has its relaxing moments leaving it as a new kind of background music. The musical composition was very well written and for whatever reason this band decided to stop all activities, I think they could have produced another album had they gotten a better lyricist. Since this is considered an extremely rare album, I can't even find a place where I can buy it or download it.

Crush on You - Crush

I don't typically listen to k-pop, but my friend highly suggested that I give this one a try. Indeed it was worth a listen. These R&B tracks are highly relaxing to. The hooks are catchy and they're fairly upbeat. When you want a little genre change in your playlist, stick Crush in it. You get a little revival of old school funk in Beautiful You, a little ambient trap music in Want, and that Usher-like flow. When I say Usher, I mean his songs like My Boo.

Dum Spiro Spero at Nippon Budokan - Dir en grey

This one isn't an official album, but the third disc of the DVD set. While these aren't recordings straight from the 2013 Nippon Budokan concerts, these are the remixed tracks that were played at the concert and some that were never heard before. When I first heard the little snippets, I was instantly hooked. Now that I got the CD, I was ecstatic. They are reinterpretations of the original songs. Like how amazing is it to have a progressive metal song become a jazz song that you can listen at a speak easy? Some of these songs, especially Lotus in my opinion, became extremely elegant when set to orchestra. It's a great example of how you can infinitely transform music. 

D.A.R.K. -in the name of evil- - lynch

I knew about lynch being a fan of Deathgaze. Hazuki, the vocalist of lynch, originally was the vocalist of Deathgaze in their early days before being replaced by Ai. If you ever listened to Deathgaze's first single, you can't even tell the difference between the voices. Lynch's album is alternative metal with a touch of the dubstep beats, some swing, hints of death metal, and swaying ballads. Definitely more on the melodic side, but they play with composition by switching between metal and ballad within one song. There's something about this album that fits to my tastes. The way they ordered the songs has it playing one after the other like a roller coaster. It is my first time listening to lynch and I think I might try more of their stuff until I dissect this album a little more.