Various Artists - Queen Teenage Visual
Rating: 5.0
Label: Queen
Release Date:
Relevant Links:
Mediocracy is really difficult to write about. A really outstanding or terrible work invokes some sort of feelings and is therefore much easier to write about. That being said, it is with a sense of indifference I present this review.
Before I get started, it is critical that you understand the premiss of this album. Queen Teenage Visual is a compilation of visual rock, better known by it’s Japanese title, visual kei. Prior to my discovery of this album, I was under the impression that visual kei was only popular among teenage Japanese girls, and Japanese pop culture obsessed westerners. Much to my surprise, there are enough Korean fans of this music that a handfull of Korean bands doing visual kei exist.
So you are still wondering what visual kei is exactly. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert, but, like the title suggests it is music that relies heavily on theatrics and (big surprise here) visuals. Some of the bigger names in this genre are Gackt and Dir en Gray, both Japanese. Please bear in mind that I am only assuming that they are big since I, who could give two craps about this style music, have heard of them.
As a point of compairison, these bands look like a cross between Marilyn Manson, Shout at the Devil era Motley Crue, and that goth / vampire kid in your 11th grade English class. But this only speaks of their look. What does it sound like you ask? In general visual kei takes 80’s glam metal to use as the basis of their sound. Onto this they graft on orchestral and opera elements. The end results come out sounding like some kind of final boss video game music. But the sound is pretty much irrelevant, since as we have already discussed, this genre is refered to as “visual” rock. Perhaps a better moniker for visual kei would be, “beautiful asexual men that teenage Asian girls (and chunky western Japanophiles) can have crushes on and swoon over,” rock, since that is pretty much the premise behind these bands. Get a bunch of asexual pretty boys in spandex and cloaks and the girls will just go ape shit. It often seems that the music takes a backseat to the kabuki theatrics, big hair, and oddly shaped guitars.
That being said, here’s a review of Korean bands, doing visual kei…such a pointless review begins…NOW!
The album offers up 10 tunes by 6 different bands, so in most cases we get to sample a couple tunes from each band. The band Kloud offer up the most dramatic songs on the album. They’re all synthesizer string sections and 80’s hard rock “meedley meedley” guitar solos. And, one of their songs has a harpsicord in it…I’m not even joking! For those of you in Japan who know who or what Gackt is, Kloud sound a lot like him.
Ray offer up two songs as well. In “High,” the singer’s inflection is really strange (the first time I heard it, I wondered if he was singing in Japanese). Musically that track is more over the top visual rock (though not as extreme as Kloud). I actually liked the other Ray song, “Get Your Mind.” It is a lot more straight forward in it’s rock and stays clear of the faux orchestras.
Lluvia are not so courteous. They provide a pair of tracks, a good 80% of which sound like they were made using a Casio keyboard and a laptop.
Guyz (yes, with a Z) vere into the realm of techno metal. The riffs in “Come on Back,” sound like they could have been a Judas Priest song, but on top of these riffs are all sorts of weird keyboard space noises and electronic drums. Their other track, “Virus,” mixes quasi nu-metal with more space noise, and a really 80’s sounding rock chorus. The singer goes from sounding like Adrenaline-era Chino (singer from Deftones) to Sebastian Bach (singer from Skid Row) at the drop of a hat.
The band Skinship offer up some quasi rap-rock nonsense (Kid Rock not Rage Against the Machine) with 80’s guitar solos. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this band us their name. Skinship (스킨십) is such a Konglish word! Like Voltron, it combines two lesser words: “skin” and “relation(ship)” to form the mighty skinship. At first I understood this term to refer to sexual intercourse, but apparently it refers to any and all touching (holding hands, kissing, hugging, ect.) regardless of gender or age. So when 5 year old boys in my class run up and grab my arm, they are demonstrating skinship…whatever.
The Mad Fret song sounded so much like Metallica, I half-expected James Hetfield’s mustachioed growl to kick in. It did not. Instead I was treated to some eunuch sounding dude (it might have actually been a woman) that would have made Geddy Lee (from Rush) proud.
I’ve listened to a lot of contemporary Korean music (rock, rap, pop, metal, and everything in between), and out of everything, this was the first album that sounded really foreign. Pop a Korean indie CD in and you’ll hear Nirvana and Radiohead’s fingerprints all over it. Listen to Korean pop music and you’ll hear similarities to the top 40 nonsense on the radio in America. This CD was unlike anything I’ve previously heard, but perhaps that is because these guys are borrowing Japan as opposed to the West.
