~*~Japanese Visual Rock sites and eGroups~*~
A good visual indie site.. though with a few major problems. It features a nice primarily Shockwave based design with a clean look, and if you ignore the bad English, it looks fairly professional. The site itself is divided into three main sections. The first, arguably the main part, is the music section, which features many MP3s of a wide selection of visual indie bands. Now quite a few catches though. First off, a lot of the pages for the bands don't have any MP3s or even a picture of the band up.. and some of the band pages if you try to click on them will just give you dead links. Further, the selection of MP3s from each band is rather.. erm.. selective.. in that the webmaster often has only a few tracks from each CD up. But the biggest problem and probably the most annoying feature of any J-Rock site I've ever seen, is that nearly all the MP3s require an unzip password, which she doesn't give you. What she does do is put a sort of trivia question on each band page, with the answer being the unzip password. Now a few are easy, just asking for the name of a certain member of the band or what band a certain member was in prior.. info which is given on the page if you read it.. so not really a problem. But a lot, however, are more obscure, not given on the page, that if you aren't completely into the band you're probably not going to know. Needless to say.. extremely annoying, and completely defeating the purpose of exposing new bands to people who don't know about them yet. And sadly, that's the very reason the webmaster does it.. when asked about it on the site's message board she's said that the MP3s are only for those in the know of the visual indie scene. ~rolls eyes~ Visual rock elitism.. pathetic. Getting past that, if you should actually want to be able to hear the MP3s but don't know the unzip password, you're welcome to email me as I know most of them (read: not all). So moving past that section and all its annoyances.. the second part of the site is for photos of a selection of visual indie bands. The scans for the most part are large and high quality.. nothing really to complain about here. ^_^ The third section is a gallery of fan art of J-Rockers. I don't care for fan art myself, but if you do you might as well check it out while you're there. Overall and despite the numerous flaws, a good Japanese visual indie site.. but it could be a great one, should the webmaster ever grow up and get over her little visual-elitest attitude.
This site was one of the best J-Rock sites on the internet. Unfortunately, the webmaster (for about the fifth time in the site's history) called it quits.. and given that it hasn't been updated since October.. it seems she really meant it this time. Though lacking updates.. there's still a lot of good stuff available here. ^_^ There's a number of band galleries with literally hundreds of very high quality scans from J-Rock magazines. There's also a good MP3 section.. and though the selection isn't particularly enormous, and like with the galleries it's primarily more mainstream J-Rock bands, there's still a lot of good stuff here.. and the quality is very good for 128 kbps encoding. ^_^ And if you want some J-Rock wallpapers and Winamp skins.. the Japanese Channel has one of the biggest selections of them around. ^_^ Now, given the fact that it's a dead site.. it's starting to look like one.. in that certain images and links no longer work. So go here and get what you can while you still can, and you'll probly never have to come back to it again. ^_~
A decent J-Rock site with a leaning towards visual indie bands. Getting past the boring page design and bad English abounds.. there's a small selection of individual band pages with some photos, info, discographies, etc. I wouldn't recommend using this site as an information source though.. as there are quite a few mistakes.. such as inaccurate news, incorrect release dates, and mislabeled band members.. on the Vasalla page for instance he has Sin's picture up on K-Suke's page. The fundamental woes continue into the MP3 section. Though large and with a wide variety of both mainstream and obscure Japanese bands.. it's extremely difficult to use. This is mainly because the webmaster, Morrigan, uses an ill-maintained FTP as the section itself. First off it has only a four user limit.. meaning that if there's already four people on and you try to login to download some stuff, you're out of luck. As a suggestion, try getting on late at night, I've found I can usually get into it then. Unfortunately once you're finally able to get in, you'll find the downloading is slow going and not directly compatible with download managers like GetRight.. meaning you're going to have to be on your computer downloading each MP3 individually and spending quite some time doing that.. I bet you're thrilled. And then after a few hours you'll be greeted with the surprise of no longer being logged in to the server, and have to try relogging in.. and guess what.. it's at its four user limit again and you can't get in. :) But that's not the end of the fun.. many of the MP3s, particularly the ones uploaded by the webmaster, aren't labeled, the files are named in a "Track 1.mp3", "Track 2.mp3", format.. and no, the song titles aren't labeled on the MP3s' ID tags either. Who knew knowing the name of what you're listening to would be such an unattainable luxury? Now if the band is one of those with a section featured on the site you can look in their discographies there and take the chore of labeling them yourself.. but most of them there just aren't sections up on the site for them.. how convenient. You can try asking on the site's BBS then.. nice hassle huh? Well despite all the site's problems, there's some good stuff here.. and a lot of MP3s available, provided you can get them.. good luck with that. An interesting feature of the MP3 section is that it's open to your own uploads.. and many of the MP3s there are uploaded by just visitors of the site.. which does explain the nice big selection of stuff available. :) I've uploaded many MP3s of Blam Honey, Lareine, The Piass, and Vasalla there myself. ^_^ So check it out.. hopefully Morrigan will eventually fix some of the site's problems.. and who knows, you might just be lucky enough to enjoy some its content. :)
MP3s, videos, and literally hundreds of nice pictures of mainstream visual bands.. what could possibly be wrong? Well, the whole site's in Chinese. Ouch. While you can improvise without knowledge of the ancient language in the photo galleries, some of the MP3s and videos also feature that lovely trivia unzip password joy pioneered by Visual Rock Art.. but this time with them written in, you guessed it, Chinese, for extra fun. A good site, though too bad it's in a language about four billion people in the world don't know. Sorry non-Chinese speakers.
A small but good visual bands site with a simple but nice design.. and most notably featuring a decent gallery of a lot of visual bands, and an intro to visual electronic bands. Unfortunately, the updates are very infrequent.. visit the site then mark your calendar three months from now to check it again.. you may find that one whole picture has been added to the gallery. Sadly, that isn't an exaggeration, I'm completely serious.
Server devoted to sites of visual rock fans. ^_^ Diverse content and well worth a look around.
You'll never guess what's on this site.. man I hate these obscure metaphoric page titles. But after reading the short intro you'll quickly find it's a site featuring translations of J-Rock lyrics and interviews. The translations are all done by the American webmaster, known as (you guessed it) Kurai, and they're actually some of the best available on the net. ^_^ Not a single damn grammatical error to be found in the translations.. what a refreshing change from the norm. And given the large and coninuously growing selection of song and interview translations, this is an extremely valuable site, especially to non-Japanese speaking visual rock fans. Granted the page design and layout is simplistic to the point of sleep-inducing.. but given the site's content, you weren't really expecting a Javascript and Shockwave graphics onslaught, were you? ^_~
The site isn't fully up yet, but it looks promising. Looks to have a leaning towards darker visual bands.
Something of collective of four sites under the same domain all handled by the webmaster who goes by the alias of Luthien. The first of the web quartet is Bishounen Blues, the "general J-Rock site" of the bunch. Ironically, this section has the least to offer of the four. You too should soon discover that you've entered the third world of webpage design after you enter the image gallery to find thumbnails are an unheard of mythical ideal here. And sadly some of the pictures aren't available on other sites.. so if you have the time you too can click through text link after text link waiting for each large image to load.. who knows.. after a couple hours you might just find a gem. :) BB also features some "reports" of a few of the webmaster's trips to Tokyo.. I'm sure you'll be just as enthralled as I was. There's also some wallpapers and Winamp skins available here.. so check those out if you're interested. Oh.. and there's an MP3 section.. where you can rejoice in the nostalgia of hearing your favourite J-Rock bands in 56 kbps quality. A few years ago this was nice.. today, less than 128 kbps is a joke, so don't bother here. Now moving all the way back to the site's main entrance, you can go to those other three sites-in-the-site. Each are individual fan sites for three of the webmaster's favourite visual bands.. Stella Maria, Due le quartz, and Syndrome. Now the Stella Maria one is literally one of the only English sites for the band on the net.. so like them or not, the site here for them serves a purpose. Unfortunately, and as you'll soon find with the other two band sites.. there really isn't much here.. a little bio, some pics, a few MP3 samples.. if you have a fast connection you can be done voyaging through the universe of Stella Maria in about ten minutes. And while the other two sites are decent, these bands are a bit bigger and thus already well featured on the net.. meaning if you already frequent J-Rock sites, you're probably not going to find anything of DLQ or Syndrome here you haven't already seen before. Overall yurameki.com is a decent site, though one that could certainly use improvement.
This could be a fantastic site. It's best aspect is that the webmaster, Cameron, is an American visual rock fan who lives in Tokyo, frequents live shows, and posts the live pics he takes on his site. Unfortunately, he is also the cause of all the problems of his site.. which does overshadow that unique advantage that he has. First off, anyone who has their "site" on MSN Communities needs to be taken with a grain of salt anyways. Unfortunately the suspicions do follow through into reality, as after reading a few of the live reviews.. you'll discover the webmaster is indeed, an ignorant moron. Now some of the site's problems are more just laughable.. how many bands he'll refer to as "thrash metal" for instance.. lol.. about four out of every five bands he sees it seems. Which is then followed by absurd comparisons of some of the visual rock bands he sees to, most often, Marilyn Manson and Motley Crue. ~rolls eyes~ The ignorance ensues, as you'll also find he'll bash just about any non-rock and more electronic or synth based band he sees.. not giving any artistic insight or a description into it other than he just hates electronic music.. cute. He continues to throw his two cents in throughout the site, all on the same par of intelligence as the prior mentioned, but sometimes getting worse.. even offensively so.. he makes a particularly sexist comment while regarding Nene from Amadeus for instance. Since a complete character change is pretty much implausible, it's unlikely any of this site's problems are going to be fixed any time soon. It's a great site for live pics of indie visual bands.. just ignore the writing. Let's hope someone else will take the same concept and do it better.. and hopefully not on MSN Communities.
The most popular Japanese visual rock eGroup and arguably the best. ^_^ A great place for general J-Rock discussion and information.
A good eGroup for visual indie bands. You'll find on Visual Paradox that your inquiries regarding Art Marju Duchain and The Piass are often met with clueless responses from Glay and Luna Sea fans.. so this is a better eGroup for less mainstream tastes.
An eGroup which I own and moderate that focuses on Japanese visual electronic bands.
One of the most popular online stores for buying Japanese CDs and videos. Their J-Rock selection for the most part is mostly limited to major label bands though, with a limited selection of indie bands that are usually only available if their label is using a major distributor.
A good online store for Japanese CDs and videos, with a complete selection of major label J-Rock bands and a decent variety of indie ones.