First off, I am not going to talk about the visual aspects of the bands here. Today, I’m going to talk about sound similarities between bands. So for now (for this post) please forget terms like oshare kei, angura kei, eroguro kei (which are all costuming based anyway). I will mostly be referring to mainstream, popular bands as examples.
In visual kei, there are many diffierent musical styles (as I’m sure you all already know), which for the sake of this post, we’ll call genres. There are pop, rock, pop rock, gothic, metal (all varieties possible), hip hop, electronic pop, dance rock, video game music, circus music, and the undfineable visual rock (there are more too if you really want to break it down further).
Some bands fall under one genre:
*example: Dir en grey are a gore metal band (they might qualify for simply ‘metal’, but Kyo likes blood too much).
Some bands fall under more than one (i.e. multiple!) genres:
*example: Alice Nine. can be considered pop, rock , and metal, but they are best described as pop rock.
And yet other bands change genres over time:
*example: Antic Cafe began as visual rock (and bad visual rock at that!), but they are currently dance rock.
Now of course, this all means that some bands fall under the same genre.
Genre example: Metal
I’d put Gazette, Girugamesh , and Sadie under the genre of metal. Now this does not mean that any of these bands sound the same, but instead that they have something in common (sound wise). Such as, heavier guitar lines, bass & drum driven, screamed vocals, etc… Of all these common elements say to me: metal band!
I chose these three bands on purpose because it seems to be a fairly common thought that all of them sound the same. That isn’t true. And no, Girugamesh doesn’t sound exactly like Gazette, neither does Sadie. And no, they don’t all sound like Dir en grey either. But they are all from the same family of music (if you will) so there should be some common features. How do you recongize siblings if they don’t look anything alike?
☆Miki
