Needless to say that Japanese people “think different”(c). You can see it everywhere from giant anime robots to oldest samurai traditions. Their music is also under this spell.

The band that will “headline” this post is called Despairs Ray. They play something called j-rock (j-metal sometimes) and belong to the visual key movement. J-rock is generally based on European music like nu metal, industrial and punk but with incredible J flavor. The result is a combination of vocals raging from harsh screams to melodic singing, no to melodic Japanese singing because this is what really differs from all the others, and highly energetic and melodic music.

Despairs Ray as for me are one of the best representatives of these music. They toured the world only twice and I managed to catch them live in 2006. They were just incredible; I came for like “watch the j-dudes for 5 minutes” and stayed for the whole show.

If you are interested you can easily get their albums “Coll Set” (2005) and “Mirror” (2007) on Amazon.