Let’s start with the venue. I wanted to see a concert at Budokan. The place is famous for not only who has played here but for the live albums that have come out of performances at Budokan (Cheap Trick at Budokan, Judas Priest’s Unleashed in the East, Deep Purple’s Made In Japan, etc.).
Arriving at Budokan can be a magical experience by itself. You cross a moat into the imperial grounds and go through a gate which may have been here for centuries. I didn’t arrive during the day (as I actually had a migraine until an hour before the show started, yuck), so the picture below was from a prior visit. At night the atmosphere is even better though.
There really isn’t a bad seat in the house for viewing purposes. I was three rows from the very back, but I could still see well. The sound was not good though. I’m not sure if it was just my location, or if that was the case everywhere in Budokan on this night. I was hoping for really great sound, like Opeth had in Tokyo, but Budokan disappointed in this important area. Perhaps the sound was good near the mixing board, where I usually try to stand. The seating was assigned so I didn’t have a choice.
There were at least six or seven cameras filming the proceedings so I’m guessing there will be a live DVD of the performance at some point. It will be interesting to see how much better the sound is for the DVD.
Dir En Grey’s music is all over the place in terms of genre. Unfortunately, I only like some of it. Usually I like the heavier elements of bands that perform in various styles (Opeth for instance). There are a few exceptions (Katatonia and Enslaved come to mind). Dir En Grey falls under this exception. They have imitated the sounds of some other bands (Rage Against the Machine and Korn come to mind and some of the death metal vocals are not remotely original) on some songs and I find these tunes to be their worst material. Funk Metal and Nu Metal just don’t do it for me. I don’t mind the Dethklokish vocals when they don’t make up the bulk of a song (like in the masterpiece Vinushka), but some other Dir En Grey numbers I can’t even stand to listen to (like “Repetition of Hatred” and “Stuck Man”).
The beginning of the show was very cool. While Sa Bir played in the darkness, some images appeared on a screen in front of the stage, the crowd stood and went absolutely nuts. I have never seen anything like it. The Japanese usually cheer in unison, but this was anything but a chant. It sounded like thousands of gargoyles had been released and they were all screaming at the stage. I got chills. Dir En Grey then went into Vinushka with the screen still up. I thought they were going to do the show with the see-through screen showing images, but it came down near the end of Vinushka–a very nice effect in any case.
Ironically, some of the background images were the same as those I’ve shown on the blog in the past week. They had pictures from Wat Phra Kaew during “Dozing Green.”
I was too far away, the lighting was too low, and the arena was shaking too much for me to get any good close up shots.
Posted on January 10th, 2010 under Japan. Tags: dir en grey, metal. Comments: 1
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