General introduction :

This band is amazing. Their songs are sometimes dark and gloomy but at some other times, they make your heart filled with warmth. Their themes are mostly about humanity: love & hate, jealousy, pain &....tragedy. I can't help finding them of much similarity to Shakespeare's tales, though in a more 'explicit' way. I saw the BBC production of animations of Shakespeare's tales. Its dark atmosphere, helplessness of human weaknesses instantly reminds me of many a picture protrayed by the lyrics of Dir en grey. One thing that I like about their song is that there is a clear start (often with interlude, a small change of tempo or beat )and ending to their songs, not like the repeat-chorus-to-infinity cliche style ^^. I like this structural beaty to their songs very much ne ^^This is my three-trials on DEG...

Engage & En-cage :

Before I have heard any of their songs. I have already been seeing these guys a lot on music magazines. Then I thought, who are these guys? They are major already but they are still sooo visual. (b.t.w.@ that time Shinya's still having his long hair and looked really feminine)Yet their type of visual look is quite different from Malice Mizer, the most visual band I've known yet. Dir en grey's visual images have a gothic, combat-outfit kinda style to it while Malice's ones are more of the classical and graceful tone.

I wondered why they seemed to be such a big hit in such a short time after their debut. I decided to try on their stuff by buying their video "GAUZE-62045-". I was a bit shocked at the amount of bloody and violent scenes in the MTVs-right from the start to the end with only several exceptions-and, as a result. didn't pay much attention to the music itself..^.^ Gomen ne~ This had driven me away from them for a while. But I'm convinced that there must be a logical reason why they are so popular, so I headed on to my second trial on DEG. I bought their Osaka Live Video. Well, to be frank, since I'm not very familiar with their songs at that time and they tend to stretch their songs a lot in their live and (dunno if it's the cut for the video or what's actually happening) they play one song after another without much pause in between! Therefore I can't recognize which is the song that I liked and I often treated one song as two since they are stretched so long... As you can see, I wasn't very much impressed by their performance at that time .. ^.^ So again I was driven away from their music. But there was still a voice at the back of my mind telling me that I've missed out something in this band. Finally, I heard their song "Cage" on mp3. I was totally captured by the rhythmic bass solo in the song. I kept listening to it over & over again, feeling my pulse race in excitement on hearing it. I started to like it so much that I went out to buy their album-"GAUZE". That's when I really started to enter their music world. What I've been missing all the while back was actually their MUSIC! After I had listened to the album over & over again & got familiar with their songs I watched the "GAUZE-62045-" & their live video again, this time totally enjoying myself over their energetic performance and spooky, horror-movie-like visual imagery they are so good at creating.