Syndrome Presents "PSYNICAL WALTZ 5th Night"
2002/02/08, Shibuya On Air West
 

(Now corrected and significantly more accurate!)

Introducing...
The SHAMPOO SCALE (from 0 to 5)
The Shampoo Scale rates the strength of shampoo scent wafting in the air during a band's set. It's the fruity floral fragrance of Lux and Vidal Sassoon that inevitably saturates the air when Japanese girls headbang. When you smell that shampoo, you know the hair's flying! (This is not meant to be an indication of how GOOD a band is, just how much headbanging they get, okay?)

D'espairs Ray
The amazing lyricless band! Dude, what happened? Did the dog eat the lyrics sheet? Guys, next time don't write your lyrics on matchbook covers, that's just the WRONG way to keep things organized! I'm making a joke of it, but seriously, the first two songs were little more than "OI!" and "HUH!" The third song was a ballad, and went like this: "La la LAA la, la la LAA la, la la laaaAAAAHH". With the exception of a few "UUUUH"s, there were no other lyrics in that song. Really. The 4th song sounded like it could have had lyrics, maybe, possibly, except that I couldn't make out a single word and concluded they were probably pulling a "Louie Louie". They looked pretty, I'll give them that (especially the guy on the left with his shoulders left nicely bare by a bustier), and their stage presence and presentation were surprisingly good for an opening band, but once I started listening for a word (ANY word) in their lyrics, I totally stopped being able to take them seriously.

As a note, I saw them again on February 21st, and they were a lot better. All the songs they did had lyrics. However, apparently the songs on the 21st weren't the good songs. Hm. ^^; Well, I had a lot of fun seeing them on the 21st.
Shampoo rating: 1 (probably because they opened)

NUDE
Despite the attention that most vocalists get, they're not always the star of the show. Nude has a decent enough singer (name in kanji) who nobody notices because guitarist Tatsuya has so much stage presence. The vocalist is a small, slender, graceful guy who can be surprisingly loud when he sings and in most other indies bands would probably do well enough at holding his own. Tatsuya's active enough to begin with even when he's burdened with a guitar, but when he takes it off it's like there's an explosion of testosterone that reduces the other members to cheerleaders. Towards the end of their set he removed the guitar, grabbed the vocalist's microphone, and led off what appeared to be the band's most popular song with a series of "OI"s at the top of his lungs as the crowd exploded.
Shampoo rating: 3.9

Delta Ark
Um. Hm. Neither heavy enough for the headbanging girls to get into nor melodic enough to be fun for the Aioria fans. Are they big in another part of the country? Nude had WAY more crowd support, so I don't know why Delta Ark got the better time slot. They were nice and all, but unremarkable.
Shampoo rating: .3

Aioria
We got a little surprise at the beginning of their set when Hiroki came on stage and leaped right into the crowd. Kinda stole the thunder from Michiru's appearance, but Michiru was prepared with a bag of rose petals to throw over the audience. (BTW, rose petals are really hard to catch ^^;) This time, Misa not only had hair, he had a hat and some kind of complicated furry outfit. He knocked over his microphone stand early on, but that didn't dissuade him from getting a little friendly with it later. Sarino didn't leave much of an impression on me... he's just sort of there... He's a good singer but doesn't have a lot of stage presence, and between Michiru and Misa, it's easy to forget to watch him.

They played 4 songs -- "Hana Kotoba", "Fantasia", "Ibara no Mori", and one song I didn't recognize that was slower and quieter than the others but not quite a ballad. I don't know if it's a new song or if it's just one of the 2 that Streamload has been telling me for a week is "temporarily unavailable" (-_-;)... I asked the name from some girls who were next to me in front of Michiru and seemed to be big fans (I'm sure I saw them at the last show), but they didn't know either. Rats. "Hana Kotoba" is a great song to open with, especially with that anticipatory intro. (yes, they play the little intro bits from the recordings before each song) It's a lot more fun and bouncy live. The hand movements are a little difficult though... the trick is to watch Sarino to find out what you're supposed to be doing for the instrumental parts of this song. The chorus is just straightforward hand-waving from side to side. The movements for "Fantasia" are even worse, as (to me at least) they seem a little reminiscent of the "Hana Kotoba" ones and it's confusing... It seemed like a lot of people didn't know the movements for the last song, or maybe it doesn't yet have much in the way of movements, because everybody eventually just went for the usual waving hands forward thing.
Shampoo rating: 0 (This is appropriate, as they don't want you to headbang. Do the hand movements instead, even if you'd rather shake your head.)

ElDorado
If you read my blog, you know that I had a bit of a mixup with the band names. So I was sure that Nude was ElDorado (because that vocalist looks a lot like Kaede did when he had dark hair), and that this band would therefore be D'espairs Ray. Chalk this up to a combination of me not taking the trouble to remember what bands I haven't been listening to look like, the enquete packet not having anything but Syndrome stuff, the goods tables out front being totally chaotic and not having any D'espairs Ray stuff anyway, and a serious lack of photos in Shoxx and the internet to verify who was who. Even the photos I did find were so out of date that they were totally useless. Anyway...

I'd heard that D'espairs Ray was so awesome live that I had a feeling I might not like them, in a kind of "they're good live, that means they're seriously heavy, that means I'm going to be bored" way. But hey, this band was really good. ^_^ They struck just the right balance between aggression and melody -- aggressive enough to drive the audience berserk during a performance, yet with enough variety and melody in the music that you'd want to listen to the songs at home. The first song with the rouse-the-crowd fist in the air part went on a little too long... other than that, there was nothing bad about them, it was all good. I wanted to buy one of their CDs after the show, but obviously THAT didn't happen, and I didn't figure out that this was ElDorado until I saw a new photo of them (showing Kaede with the blond hair he had at the show) at Marui One for their upcoming fair, whereupon I bought "Aula" that night. "Suna no Oukoku" was one of the songs they performed for this show, and it was catchy and memorable enough that after a single hearing I could recognize it 3 weeks later and remember the para-para, too!
Shampoo rating: 4.9
It was actually uncomfortable to breathe at the end of their set, that's how much the livehouse reeked of shampoo. I'd give them a 5, but I'm not sure that there might not be some band out there who can get it so stinky that people have asthma attacks.

Syndrome
This was their event, but I was far from impressed by them. They only played 3 songs, each of which must have been at least 20 minutes long. Their songs are kind of long anyway, *and* they padded them out with all kinds of repetitive segments. Never mind that the 2nd song was a ballad, and who wants to stand around listening to an endless slow song during a concert? The vocalist was an unimpressive figure in an enormous feathered hat that looked like something out of Kyo's old indies rejects closet and it completely shadowed his face so nobody could see anything. As far as his singing went, he's better than some of the vocalists Kisaki's worked with, but then again that's not the highest recommendation. One of the guitarists looked like a Kaoru cosplayer... um... which band is this? Kisaki himself is an excellent bass player and gives you plenty of opportunities during the songs to appreciate his skill, however he's not the liveliest person onstage and spent the entire 2nd song hidden behind the vocalist. Not a band I need to see again. And oddly enough, considering that they were the headliners and played last, nobody started an "encore" chant. It happened at all 3 of the concerts I went to before this -- the foreign band, Aioria, and New Sodmy all had the audience clapping for an encore -- but nothing for Syndrome.
Shampoo rating: 2

 

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