Dir en grey Tour19 This Way to Self Destruction @ Gramercy Theater

I never got the time to write about the concert experience and this was the last concert I went to before the pandemic hit the United States. I consider myself lucky to have been able to attend Dir en grey's performance in 2019 because from what I heard, all the tickets were being scalped no matter what state you were in. I had been lucky to have obtained the pre-sale code because on the day the tickets were released to the general public, there were none left. It had been sold out during the pre-sale. A serious case of ticket scalping if you ask me. Now looking back in the year 2022, this was the last concert attended before COVID-19 and will be my last one for a very long time.

I had learned from my previous Dir en grey concert where to stand. Since I was not interested in getting a very up close view of the band, I stood towards the back on the right side where Die is usually at. As usual, their concerts often take place during the late autumn. This time it was on December 13 and I remember it being very cold that night because it was raining hard. The setlist consisted of mostly of tracks from The Insulated World. Like my experience with the Arche album, certain songs sounded better after experiencing them live. It's strange, but I had difficulty liking every single song when I first heard them on the CD. It's only after hearing the songs performed live that my opinion on them would change. 

There were some surprising tracks thrown in like Merciless Cult and Saku. Maybe the band didn't want to revert to the same old rhythm of performing The Final and Obscure at every single concert. I noticed Die wasn't as energetic as last time. Not to be confused with his performance though. It was still great to watch, but he looked more tired than several years ago. The SE the band used was very different from last time at Tour15 Never Free From the Awakening. The screen images had so much occult in it and a lot of the visuals match a lot from what you see in the Ningen wo Kaburu video.

A week after the concert, I missed seeing the band. Those after concert blues hit you hard.