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. 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. 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. 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. 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. What makes all this work is that Dir En Grey don't just bring the metal, they also bring the vibe. 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. 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'. 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'. The Insulated World is gone, it can't hurt you anymore.įor the uninitiated, Dir En Grey are a band.

Dir en grey discography torrent