Review Summary: It's okay. Relax your shoulders. Unclech your jaw. Breath out. The Insulated World is gone, it can't hurt you anymore.
For the uninitiated, Dir En Grey are a band. Primarily a metal one, but referring to present day Dir En Grey as 'a metal band' feels about as descriptive as labelling late era Beatles as 'pop'. On any given album a run of tracks could start with a three minute death metal explosion followed by a haunting piano ballad, a ten minute prog metal epic, a catchy hard rock song, and then culminate in a composition that you could only really describe as 'experimental'. All this whilst a vocalist with a near five octave range flits effortlessly between cleans, growls, screams, falsetto, pig squeals, and virtually any other vocal technique you can name throughout each song.
What makes all this work is that Dir En Grey don't just bring the metal, they also bring the vibe. The atmosphere. The dark unsettling mood that gives even the most soaring beautiful moments the same feeling of fatalistic hopelessness it gives the most intense sections of brutal death metal riffing. That's the Dir En Grey Difference (tm); the thing that allows the band to explore so many disparate genres, often within the same song, without the listener feeling like they're playing a randomly ordered Best Of compilation, or that Spotify has skipped to a different artist entirely. Whilst their previous effort The Insulated World wasn't a disaster it only really brought the metal, not the vibe, and thus never really felt like it measured up to the three releases that preceded it.
If you're new to the band and clicked on this review out of curiosity, the gist here is that Phalaris is a superlative metal album that hops effortlessly in and out of sounds, moods and genres, bookends itself with a pair of nine-plus-minute epics, throws in an equal amount of soaring melodic vocals as it does guttural shrieks, gives you all the down-tuned seven string riffs you could ask for, and all the while still somehow feels like a consistent piece of music rather than a collection of random sounds.
If you're a fellow returning vet this fits somewhere between Arche and The Insulated World; the immediacy of the latter paired with the inspired songwriting of the former. '13' is a career high (arguably one of several on this album), closer 'Kamuy' will tease you for seven haunting minutes before it deigns to progress towards it's distorted climax, 'The Perfume of Sins' sees the band dip into just a touch of black metal influence, and 'Oboro' is everything 'Ranuculus' could have been with a bit more effort. The electronics are tastefully incorporated, strings are prominent in a way that really add to the songs, and Kyo sounds like he's having fun on this one rather than forcing the kind of tortured performance a successful, content middle-aged man just isn't likely to have in him anymore. The riffs are on point, the tracklist has been pruned of filler down to a scant 11, and they didn't let the intern do the mix this time. In short, it's great.
Criticism, at a push, largely boils down to 'this isn't Oroboros, Dum Spiro Spero or Arche'; not necessarily because it doesn't measure up to those records, but because it doesn't push the band's sound forward into unexpected new territory in the same way. This is Dir En Grey at their most comfortable rather than their most experimental. But 11 albums and three masterpieces in, on the comeback from what may be the only dip in their discography in the last fifteen years, that's absolutely fine.
