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deadman
It rocked. I'm hooked. Gotta see them again! I think they did all their songs, and the performance was really solid... the music was tight and well done, and Mako is easily one of the best live singers I've seen. Not a note out of place. Between the dry ice and everybody's heads, I couldn't see Toki at all, but his drumming was like a metronome. Takamasa and aie were both in simple black clothes and were pretty quiet and low-key onstage. They didn't do a lot of moving about like other musicians -- no SMG-style choreographed steps, no headbanging... the most they did was raise their instruments and play energetically. Mako acted much more like a traditional visual-kei singer than a lot of the guys I've seen recently. Most indies vocalists seem to have a lot of choreography now, so much so that they're dancing almost constantly. Actually, I'm not sure Mako could do that even if he wanted to. (his moves are cool, but he's no dancer) ^^; And he's *really* quiet when he's not singing. He didn't say *anything* until the encore, and then he was so quiet you could barely hear him. If his singing hadn't been so loud I would have thought the microphone was off. Oh, but there was this cool thing... Mako was in a cage-thing for one song. The cage had a skeleton made of perforated metal frame thingys and was wrapped with what appeared to be Saran wrap. No kidding. Saran wrap. It was pretty tight around the frame at first, but Mako was inside and he kept pressing up against the front and stretching and wrinkling the wrap. The wrinkles sparkled in the lights, which is a surprisingly cool effect for supermarket food packaging. Well, Mako in a cage is pretty damn cool anyway. (oh yeah. #^_^#) The only problem is that the cage wasn't as tall as he was, so he spent much of the song on his knees and that made him hard to see from the back. The song was either "Oboreru Sakana" or "Buruubeejii"... er, sorry that I can't remember, I didn't take notes during the set because the only Japanese bands whose entire song lists I can identify just from listening are Lareine and New Sodmy. (That is, unless the name of the song is in the lyrics or I'm used to clicking on the MP3. ^^;) Well, something interesting happened during both those songs! Mako's blond now. He's been blond for at least 2 months, judging by the length of his roots. It looks good. (of course, I'm a little biased, I love blond hair on Japanese guys) He was wearing whiteface, exaggerated black lipstick, and the spooky cat-pupil contact lenses. His top was an interesting combination of a pinstriped button-down shirt and black vest all in one, and he was wearing leather pants. (and like I said, aie and Takamasa were in simple black clothes, and I couldn't see Toki at all.) Mako's incredibly gorgeous and sexy, but everybody already knows that... Takamasa's much cuter than in pictures. They did two encores, which was really surprising. They took a long time about doing the first one, which provoked the audience into doing a special kind of "encore" chant which alternated male and female voices. The guys would yell "AN-KO-RE!" and the girls would shout "Hey!" to the beat of clapping hands, and after doing this for a while they'd switch. (I've never seen anything like it.) The second encore was totally unexpected. The lights went on and this usually means everything's completely over, right? So the people in back started filing out and hovering around the goods table, and then suddenly the lights inside went back off and we all ran back. They did two songs for the encore (sorry that I don't remember the names), one of which had already been played. A comment on the livehouse... I know Rokumeikan is historically interesting to the visual fan, being as so many great bands have performed in it, but it SUCKS to see a show there. Take the $#%@in' chairs OUT already! It sucks to spend a show crammed in the very back when you know there's room up in the front, but be unable to get there because there are so many railings and seats in the way. And what are the people up front doing? They're doing little mini-moshes in between the rows of chairs, pretending that there's somebody right in front of them to bang into. -_-; It's really stupid. Rokumeikan may have originally been a movie house or porn theater or whatever, but it's been a livehouse for at least a decade now and you'd think that somebody would have figured out that they could cram twice as many people into the room (and make twice as much money for big-draw names) if they'd remove the seats.
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