Style: Electronic Punk Rock
Period: early nineties, revived in late nineties and still alive
Current member: Hayato MIZUTA (vo, g, programming)
Similar oversea artist: Jesus Jones, Early Ministry, NIN
Similar japanese artist: Soft Ballet, M-age
Related artist: Console Mix, Gniuw Tools
Recommend to fans of: Jesus Jones, NIN, Atari Teenage Riot
*Brief Description*
Formed in early nineties by guitarist and vocalist MIZUTA and drummer HYONO. Once they welcomed a bassist and another guitarist, but they left the band immediately. Then they decided to welcome machines instead of human musicians. Mixing punk spirit into industrial/techno sounds they succeeded to create quite original music, but they were not blessed by commercial success. So, completely exhausted, once they decided to disunite the band in late nineties and went into solo career. However, I have no idea what came to his mind, in 1999 Mizuta suddenly announced to reunite Brain Drive though without Hyono this time (I heard now he is working as a quite ordinal white-collar worker).
*Selected Works*
"Kanzen Kyoui" ("Perfect Terror")
Their first major album. Since the bassist and a guitarist left them at that time, they had to use programing though Hyono used only a small drum machine. Both their compositions and performances were on the way of development although one can find their brightness. They covered Kinks' (or rather Van Halen's) 'You Really Got Me' in this album.
"Brain Washing"
Remake of their first album released independently. This album enables you to refind their talent in composition, especially the pop sense of Mizuta. Besides that, Hyono's technique in arrangement and producing was also greatly improved. By this work they got a licence to succeed to their predecessor in eighties electro movement.
"higher"
A monumental achievement of early japanese industrial music. From their early period they used sampled guitar sounds instead of live guitars. However their abuse of these "digitalized guitars" got it's hight with this album. Anyway, this works is very violent, loud and metalic in it's true meaning.
Style: Classical Heavy Metal
Period: early eighties - 1999
Main members were: Demon Kogure (vo.), Ace Shimizu (g.), Sgt. Luke Takamura III (g.), Xenon Ishikawa (b.) and Rydeen Yuzawa (dr.)
Similar oversea artist: Judas Priest, Iron Maiden
Similar japanese artist: Ningen-isu, Kabuki Rocks, Silver Stars
Related artist: RX, Cat in the Boots, KOGURE Den'emon
Recommend to fans of: Judas Priest, Iron Maiden
*Brief Description*
Reads as "Say Key Mah Two". Phonetically it means "The end of the century", but they used intentionally different rendering of Chinese characters (called "Ateji" in Japanese) which respectively stand for "Holy, Hunger, Devil, Two" with an idea that "Striving for holy things devils awake again".
Originally formed by students of Waseda university (quite good university in Tokyo with very long history, highly difficult to enter in, though recently it's high esteem fell to the underworld) and though frequent but necessary changes of members, Seikima-II debuted in late eighties with a smash hit of 'House of Wax Dolls'. However their first album was reviewed in the "Burrn!" magazine with a mark of ZERO allegedly because they were not along with the bizarre taste of "Burrn!" guys.
Despite of some hostility from few press like this and occasional scandals of the singer, on the whole their history was blessed with good commercial success and musical maturity. Although "Burrn!" was so derangedly obstinate that these guys ignored Seikima-II completely, they produced many albums of high quality and never ceased touring all over Japan. Moreover they had some shows abroad in England, Spain and Western US and reportedly peoples welcomed them.
As their name tells, they announced that they would be disbanded in 1999 (though of course the real end of previous century was 2000). And sadly enough, they were disbanded at the end of the year without any internal conflict.
They called themselves devils came from hell. And they had devil-like make-ups and bizarre costumes with weird attitudes such as calling their show "misa", declaring that they play music for polluting peoples spirit etc. However, dispite of expectation that they play black metal, actually they played quite orthodox heavy metal. It goes without saying, they are all quite well-talented musician so that some of their songs were highly complicated.
*Selected Works*
"The Outer Mission"
Their fourth full album. No doubt this is the most progressive album during their career