I've been a Visual Kei fan since the early 2000s at least. I see so many anime posts round these parts I figure there must be more VK fans among us. Anyway here's my favorites in the genre with descriptions and song links for anyone unaware of them:
Moi Dix Mois - style = Gothic/Melodic Metal, Heavy guitars and drums with orchestral synths and clean vocals. The kinda metal that wants to be played in a Cathedral to an audience of Anne Rice vampires (Ange: Album/Live, Temptation album/live)
Jiluka - style = Death/Tech Metal. Very heavy and chaotic but still maintaining melodies, they also blend in other genre's sounds at times, crazy talented instrumentalists, their broken Engrish lyrics can be laughably bad, makes for fun reading the subtitles (Ajna, Omelas, Venom - dude, the death metal meets djent meets dubstep breakdown @ 2:20 ..I mean duuuude ...like duuuuuuuude)
Dir en Grey - style = Mostly Hard-Rock, sometimes Metal but they do ballads sometimes, they're all over the place. They're light on the VK looks most times these days but they used to be THE poster boys for VK aesthetics (Child Prey, The Final, Obscure - video so crazy people still make reaction videos to it.)
Malice Mizer - style = Imagine a theatrical romantic French poet from the 1700s started a goth rock back in the 1990's. Shares DNA with Moi Dix Moi as the guitarist/songwriter Mana started both bands (Le Ciel (Live), Au Revoir, and Beast of Blood is their heaviest track right before they broke up and Moi Dix Mois was formed and took Malice Mizer's sound as a starting point for something much heavier.)
Mucc - style = Always evolving, began sorta nu-metal, mostly hard rock but they've become more mainstream and less VK over the years, comparable to Dir en Grey in terms of song styles (Waga, Arubeki Basho, Zetsubou, Rojiura boku to kimi he)
RAN - style = Hard Rock, Metal and oddly, Pop-Rock (Go-dome no Sakura, Koroshita Kimi Koroshimashita, Season)
D'espairsRay - style = Hard Rock with Industrial influences. They only had a brief era of greatness before they attempted to sell out by changing their sound and dropping most of their VK look which failed and they broke up, they have other good album tracks but the two I link here are the only music videos they made showing their best sound IMO (Born, Garnett)
Kagerou - style = Hard Rock. Long disbanded due to the death of their lead singer who was legit one of the best singers in VK at the time. Their sound runs the default gamut for a rock-based VK band, they just did it better than most of their peers of that era (XII Dizzy, Yuugure No Shazai)
Anyway I'll stop there because I could spend all day listing Visual Kei bands worth listening to (like there are a decent number of other bands in the same lanes as Jiluka and RAN for instance). So yeah, anyone else into the genre? If so feel free to link to some songs, I'd be interested to check out your faves
Edited 6 months ago
Want to leave a comment?
Hey I used to listen to that Dir en Grey Obscure song in high school! I remember that music video being sick as fuck and really unique for the time.
Anyways I haven't heard anything you listed, but I should say that Maximum The Hormone is probably my favorite band of all time. They're kind of Nu-metal, but I think avant-garde metal is a much better descriptor since their sound travels ridiculously far and wide even within the confines of one song. They've also been killing it the last 5 years or so, you should check out |their| |last| |four| |singles| if you haven't heard them yet.
I'll check out your list here as soon as I get the chance
Oh yeah Maximum is a lot of fun. Very talented on their instruments as well, even when they're playing something simpler like a nu-metal-ish riff you can tell that isn't the limit of their skills and they're doing it because it just sounds badass (or fun or silly or hype, they got a lot of dynamics going on). I dig their stuff, got their discography in my collection just need to be in the right mood when I listen to 'em. My tastes tend more towards stuff that plays to my goth and death metal leanings, theatricality, brutality, and whatnot, thus the Visual Kei.
Cool that you were into Diru too. The Obscure video is awesome, who doesn't love a good orgy with demonic geishas and a dude with a giant metal dick with a face on it, dismembered bodies and a chick who eats a baby's head she plucked off a tree while Kyo vomits, I mean that's art right there.