ARCHE

Album review

Between relentless touring and frontman Kyo's time spent on his side project Sukekiyo, it's been nearly three-and-a-half years since Dir en Grey's last album, their longest-ever gap between them. Here the band return to Greek for their album title after a detour into Latin on 2011's Dum Spiro Spero. Arche means "Origin" and it's not hard to see a deliberate attempt to subtly evoke their earlier material while continuing to embrace the progressive metal style of their more recent work. There's definitely a return to a more tuneful sound after the out-and-out metalcore bludgeoning of the last album; with a couple of exceptions, every track, even the most brutal, has some highly melodic passages. This release sounds great, too, having a fat, big-room drum sound with a tight, punchy snare that cuts through the thick, heavy production job. As ever, there's an exquisite grasp of dynamics, and Kyo remains one of the most impressive and original vocalists in rock. There are plenty of his trademark otherworldly wails and screams here, but also a bigger classical influence in his vocals than ever before. There's plenty of Diru's trademark experimentation, too. "Phenomenon" combines filthy, distorted bass with scabrous art-jazz twangs and vibrato falsetto, while "Uroko" ("Fish Scales") brings the heavy with a pounding beat, tortuous riffing, and some of Kyo's most impressive vocal acrobatics as he swoops from multi-tracked, almost liturgical singing to throat-ripping, inhuman screams. The album's slower tracks are definitely its best: at around the halfway mark come the back-to-back highlights "Tousei" ("Voice of the Waves") and the single "Rinkaku" ("Contours"), originally released all the way back in 2012 -- both beautiful, heartwrenching power ballads. Other standouts include "Behind a Vacant Image," which segues from dissonant rumbling into one of the album's loveliest choruses, and "Kukoku no Kyouon" ("Tramplings in the Lonely Valley"), a plangent epic with spectral vocals and folky guitar work. As anticipated, this is another extremely strong album from a band widely regarded as one of the best in the world, who have become hugely internationally successful with absolutely no concessions whatsoever to commercialism or the language barrier. There's arguably an overabundance of "typical"-sounding Diru tracks here -- the band have certainly developed an immediately identifiable sound over the last few albums -- but when it sounds this good, who's complaining? Dir en Grey's rabid, hardcore fan base is clearly going to buy this anyway. Those new to the band could do a lot worse than to start here, though 2008's Uroboros is arguably a better representation of the band's late-period sound, while 2005's Withering to Death is a somewhat more straightforward and tuneful starting point.

© John D. Buchanan /TiVo