Quote:
Originally Posted by JP10
I'm a big japanese music fan in general.
Favorite Bands:
-Asian Kung-Fu Generation
-Tricott
-EVE
-Co Shu Nie
-Yorushika
-Creepy Nuts
-Lucky Kilimanjaro
-Half Time Old
-Yama
-Oisicle Melonpan
Majority of these are lighter, big thing for me is just instrumentals. Japan seems to keep pushing the boundaries instrumentally, where as you don't see that as much with main stream music here in the US.
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Agreed. And I'm not just a weeb or Japanophile. In my opinion, the Japanese music scene is more adventurous and generally more interesting than western offerings. I spent a lot of my free time during the past few years digging into Japanese music. Hundreds of hours.
Some of the artists you listed are on the popular side, some not so much. All pretty decent. For mainstream bands, I would recommend Indigo la End (indie rock) and Spitz (rock). There are a lot of quality mainstream artists, to be honest. But I've been completely focused on
doujin (同人) music for the last 3 years or so. Meaning self-published, you can think of it as indie taken a step further. I have found the doujin scene to be much more interesting than mainstream.
Why? Because doujin works are passion projects. No producers or executives imposing their will. Full creative freedom. No real concerns about marketability, just making the music they want to make. In fact, most circles lose money. Not to say that mainstream artists are lacking talent. It's just that over-produced/edited, generic-sounding music meant to appeal to a wide range of people does not tend to make for the most interesting or memorable music.
You might wonder about the production values for amateur music, but I'm not talking about Soundcloud mumble rappers here. Most doujin artists are current/former/eternal music students. Difficult to make decent music if you don't know music theory. Many also do professional work for commercial interests, so doujin works are often amateur as a technicality, not technically. Artists often have high-level equipment, or rent professional studios to record. Mixing and mastering are commonly outsourced to established names so that efforts aren't marred by fumbling around with unfamiliar software.
To give some examples:
Post-Rock. Particularly interesting bass guitar and use of varied time signatures. The bassist is
wild.
at 3:28:25.
Soft rock. Clean yet playful arrangement with beautiful vocals.
Metalcore. Something heavier to balance it out. It's not just mashing--that would be "heavy" metal or heavier. The distorted guitar is endlessly cool, and the rest of the backing instrumentation is powerful and energetic, but not frenetic. Smooth yet powerful vocals make for easy listening, although you would expect something much heavier just hearing the first few seconds.
I could go on forever about this...