I have accumulated many personal reviews while listening to albums. My reviewing style is non-conventional and was only intended for myself. Sometimes I will only use one sentence to describe an album if I feel that is all that's required. Other times I will review an album while I'm still listening to it, leading to a song-by-song review of the album (bringing the size of the review to nearly dissertation-level). There are times when I will even come back to a review to add information that I didn't know when originally writing the review. The point is that I won't edit my reviews to make them more readable or conventional. My reviews are always a direct result of what I was feeling when I wrote them and I want to let that feeling come through.



Sunday, August 7, 2011

Dir en grey - UROBOROS [2008]

Ominous and quite cool first track. "Vinushka" establishes this newer style as one that is much more deep and beautiful than previous albums. If the rest of the album is this carefully written, I'll love it. It even dives very suddenly into thrash metal with some death metal vocals before dropping back into a more acoustic section. "Red Soil" is sadly a bit more straight-forward even though I like the Death Metal section in the middle. Though, the second half of the song does redeem itself a bit some more creativity and psychotic vocals. Unfortunately, the more metal sections on this album are produced in a very flat way and with weak guitar distortion that removes most of the metal punch from the songs. That said, there's a lot to love in this album; "nice" sections are absolutely beautiful, metal sections offer a nice change from the norm, there's still some creativity thrown in there, and acoustic parts create a wonderful mood. The album is a bit too long, though. So, I start to get bored just after the half-way point. Stand-outs include "Inconvenient Ideal", "Sa Bir", and "Vinushka".

Rating: 8.25

http://www.direngrey.co.jp/

All ratings are out of 10. Rating may not be a whole number.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment, you fucks!