Review Summary: The GazettE put out their newest copycat album, adding another unremarkable, though far more consistent than normal block of fire-retardant wood to the neo visual-kei fire.
Every area of music has its copycat, bandwagon hopping outfits. You can talk about how stagnant nu-metal was when it was big, how dry post-metal has gotten and how repetitive and stale metalcore has become. But I swear for the life of me, that when it comes to stale, bland and uninspired scenes, it’s pretty hard to find another scene to hold a candle to Japan’s incredibly homogenic neo visual-kei scene. Visual-kei has, since its accidental inception, been fundamentally music equal to or greater than stage get up, never the other way around with costumes over taking the quality of the music. At some point this stopped being the case, once bands figured out that the only way to market the niche underground scene on the mainstream was their appearance. For the neo visual-kei scene and especially for the Gazette, who are one of the worst offenders, there’s one small little band that comes to mind. That band is Dir En Grey.
The reason I bring up Dir En Grey in a Gazette review is because it’s actually unavoidable, because the Gazette are practically just a Dir En Grey cover band. Not only do they and essentially every other band in the post 2000 visual-kei scene mimic Dir En Grey’s visual aesthetic to a tee, but god
damn do they sound like them as well. The best way for me to quickly sum up the Gazette’s modestly impressive bulk of a discography would be to say that they recorded a bunch of Dir En Grey covers (minus the “progressive” metal part) around the time they made their first record and they’ve been progressively releasing it over the past ten or so years, DOGMA being the most recent in this series, though to it's credit, also head and shoulders one of the most consistent.
To put it bluntly, this is a metal album. There’s lots of down tuned, chugged riffs and clean vocals with the occasional growl and scream thrown in to make it extra generic and a couple of really painful candy coated electronic moments. This sounds like their last album, it sounds like their album before that and it sounds like their album before that one too. Actually, in a lot of ways it even sounds like Diaura’s last album, Deluhi’s last album, Sadie’s last album, Lynch.’s last album, Mejibray’s last album and of course, Dir En Grey’s last album etc. In fact, this album is all their albums. The only difference is this time it’s far more consistent and polished. The songs are a lot catchier, especially around the album’s first half with songs like “
DERACINE” possessing some head banging chord progressions and some nice clean vocals from frontman Ruki. On the topic of Ruki, he sounds a lot stronger this time round than previous outings, though it’s far too easy to talk about Ruki exclusively considering almost nothing happens behind him. On top of the boring chugged out B minor riffs and chord progressions there’s the occasionally bout of electronic wank, though I hesitate to use that as a word to describe it as I can’t imagine anybody got any pleasure out of putting them on the album. These electronic blips and bloops every now and then are groan-worthy every single time, there’s not a single moment on the album where the electronics add anything or even sound particularly interesting, they’re just there.
The strongest song on the album is probably the lead single “
OMINOUS” which ironically is also the song the sounds most like a Dir En Grey song. Everything from the drum pattern that bounces around and stops at the end of the bar, the way Ruki delivers his vocals, the grim sounding piano, the random break over to acoustic leads and
especially the part where they briefly change the key to a harmonised minor just
screams Dir En Grey. But, at least it’s not a nearly unlistenable song like songs such as “
WASTELAND” which I would hesitate to even call an original piece. Regardless of their uninspired sound, the GazettE do have a couple of really catchy songs and DOGMA has some of the catchiest tracks they've had in a while, with some punchy hooks in the choruses of songs like "
DEUX."
Though lack of originality aside, at least this time around fans or followers of the band are seeing the Gazette flex their song writing abilities a little more consistently. Though the instrumentals don’t really provide an awful lot of meat to chew on, if anything vocalist Ruki is at least pretty enjoyable to listen to on DOGMA, more so than on recent releases. Say what you want, this is easily the strongest the band has been since the enjoyable DIM, it’s not a terrible album. But, it is still a really bad, super boring, relatively vapid and criminally generic album continuing the trend of uninteresting, homogenous bands and albums making up the neo visual-kei scene.
