#Dir En Grey #avant-garde metal #progressive metal #alternative metal #death metal #gothic metal #nu metal #metalcore #Japanese #visual kei #music video
Dir en Grey is the first Japanese metal band to break through in the West. Initially associated with visual kei (a Japanese musicians' movement that employed aesthetic tenets drawn from Western glam metal, including heavy make-up, elaborate hair styles, flamboyant costumes, and an androgynous look), they were arguably the most successful non-English speaking rock act since Rammstein. The band made its U.S. debut with 2007's The Marrow of a Bone, and played the festival circuit internationally as their sound began leaning on influences from goth rock and death metal to the theatrical metal of Korn and Slipknot. 2015's Arche - widely considered their masterpiece - added vanguard and technical death metal to the mix. In 2018 they revealed a more thrash-oriented sound with the controversial The Insulated World. They reappeared in 2022 with the decidedly more progressive Phalaris. From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/dir-en-grey-mn0000937315/biography
The term "visual kei" was derived from one of Japanese rock band X Japan's slogans, "Psychedelic Violence Crime of Visual Shock", seen on the cover of their second studio album Blue Blood (1989). This derivation is credited as being coined by Seiichi Hoshiko, the founding editor of Shoxx magazine, which was founded in 1990 as the first publication devoted to the subject. However, he explained in a 2018 interview with JRock News that visual kei was technically coined, or at least inspired by, X Japan's lead guitarist Hide. Hoshiko also said that at the time they were called 'Okeshou Kei' ("Makeup Style"), "but it simply felt... too cheap. Even though X Japan was a big band and people used the term 'Okeshou kei' to describe them, the term was still lacking substance. I didn't like the term at all! Because of this, I tried to remind all the writers to not use this term as 'They are not okeshou kei, they are visual-shock kei'. From there, it went from 'Visual-shock kei' to 'Visual-kei' to 'V-kei'. After we spread the word, fans naturally abbreviated it to 'V-kei'. The Japanese love to abbreviate everything as a matter of fact." Hoshiko considers visual kei a distinctive Japanese music genre and defined it "as the music itself along with all the visual aspects of it." From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_kei
