DOLL$BOXX: Best band I've heard in a long time

Cafe Society
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I want to give a big “Thanks!” to Satellite^Guy for turning me on to this band (he mentioned them over here).

I’ve discovered a lot of excellent bands in the last few years, but DOLL$BOXX has impressed me more than any of them. Though, to be accurate, this is more of a “project” than a “band”. The four instrumentalists are the all-female Japanese band, “Gacharic Spin”, while the lead singer’s regular gig is fronting a Japanese progressive metal band called “Light Bringer”. The DOLL$BOXX CD, “Doll’s Apartment”, is a one-time collaboration. But the combination works so perfectly that it’s disappointing to know that there likely will be no followup. To quote a review of the CD on Amazon (ten reviews, all giving 5 stars), “The only downside to this album is that there probably won’t be another one.”

Why am I so impressed? Simple: Every single member of this band is a top-notch player. There are no weak links. This is honestly the first band I’ve said that about since I first heard Rush in 1980. Of course, the ladies in DOLL$BOXX are much easier on the eyes than the boys in Rush :smiley: The drumming is complex, but still grooves (and, in Gacharic Spin, the drummer is also the lead singer). The keyboardist is remarkably talented. The guitarist shreds, and knows when not to shred (and there’s just something special about hearing that kind of playing out of a rather nerdy-looking, shy girl). The singer provides some of the best female power vocals ever.

I reserve my highest praise, though, for the bass player (probably because, as a bass player myself, I can relate more to what she’s doing than to the other players). Koga (or, as she calls herself, “F Chopper Koga”. Her custom basses have “FCK” on the headstocks, which is somewhat amusing to us English speakers :P) is an absolute beast of a player. She plays a lot of slap style, which I don’t play and normally don’t like, but she combines the slapping with some great fingerstyle playing. She’s complex, melodic, and tasteful all at the same time. Here she is performing a cool bass solo.

One of my favorite things about the CD is that it’s a concept album. As a prog fan (though I wouldn’t call DOLL$BOXX “prog”), I have a soft spot for concept albums. The CD has ten songs, and they actually made videos for nine of those songs. The videos are intended to be viewed in a certain order (the same order the songs appear on the CD), and … I won’t say they tell a story, I’ll say they make a point. A satirical point.

My interpretation … actually, I’m going to save my interpretation until later. I’m curious to hear what other people get out of the videos, without my interpretation biasing them.

Here is a link to a YouTube playlist that shows the videos in the correct order. Fair warning, you’ll want to set aside 40-50 minutes.

For those who don’t feel like watching the whole playlist, here are direct links to my favorites from the track list:

Take My Chance

Monopoly

Fragrance

Karakuri Town

おもちゃの兵隊

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Interesting … I pasted that last song title (the one in Japanese) into Google hoping to find a translation, and got served a bunch of photos of toy soldiers. I didn’t get a translation, though, so I pasted it into my Mac’s translation widget, Japanese -> English, and got “soldier of toy”. Yeah, toy soldiers. Interesting.

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I’m sure a lot gets lost in translation, but they’d do a lot better with a name that didn’t make them sound like an 80s hair-metal band.

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It’s pretty much universal among musicians in the visual kei genre, which is what DOLL$BOXX sort of technically is. It’s actually very rare for real names to come out – the few cases I know of are mainly like Hyde of L’Arc~en~Ciel, who got hitched to an actress well after he became famous as a musician. They won’t let you sign your marriage license with a pseudonym, even if your band does hold the record for selling out the Tokyo Dome. Others have come out after the musician in question moved on to doing other things instead of glam rock, or at least other things in addition to glam rock. Yoshiki of X Japan let his surname get loose a while ago, but he’s now also composing neo-classical pieces for the Emperor’s birthday and the Golden Globes and so forth.

The only one I know of who will tell pretty much anyone who asks is Miyavi, whose legal name is Ishihara Takamasa. He uses Ishihara Miyavi on platforms that require a surname, like Facebook. Miyavi is weird even for a visual kei musician, though. :smiley:

I don’t know what else you might know about Japanese music, Master Rik, but a lot of their image is taking the piss out of cute idol girl groups like Morning Musume.

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Thanks Rik - interesting. Their look is kinda like if the actresses from that movie Sucker Punch formed a Japanese pop-metal band. Arabella Flynn, I don’t know Japanese pop culture super well, but can see how they present themselves like a squeaky-clean pop band then whip out this big metal sound.

Really good players - I love how the blue-haired drummer pops out with Cookie Monster vocal fills in between the sung lines of the lead vocalist, who is channelling her inner Bruce Dickenson/Iron Maiden. The guitarist is doing technical stuff on her blue PRS.

Overall the music isn’t for me - too much synth sitting on top of the more raw metal sound; more of a pop-metal sound than something raw and dangerous. But they are great players and mesh well together for their sound.

I wonder how big they are in Japan, and if they have crossed-over or have more of a cult following…

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It’s a combination of a few different things. The coordinated outfits are very idol-group, as is the way they present each of the band members as having a signature look/style and color. The video for Take My Chance is specifically a take off on this sort of thing – the pink characters on the banner over the stage say “Idol Chance”, like it’s some kind of low-rent version of American Idol for girl groups. Female celebrities in Japanese culture are encouraged to stay young and cute for as long as possible, but the outfits they wear in the videos take this to an extreme. They’re so stereotypical that they look like they’ve stepped straight out of an anime series in each one.

Genres like hard rock, metal, and visual kei are almost entirely male in the Japanese music scene, and have been for decades. The number of successful female acts that are not squeaky cute pop singers is perhaps in the dozens? And the number of all-female visual kei/metal acts is probably countable on one hand. DANGER☆GANG and exist†trace are the only two other all-female metal bands I can think of off the top of my head. Sheena Ringo, a solo artist, also does some very hard rock, although she also meanders through all the other musical genres she can find.

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I just realized that I never came back to supply my interpretation :smack:

Arabella Flynn touched on it here:

Yes, that was the core of my interpretation. But repeated viewings of the videos, in the intended order, caused me to think that the message was much larger. They’re not just satirizing idol singers. They’re mocking the entire entertainment industry, the media, and pop culture for the way women and girls are portrayed, used, and sexualized.

Song-by-song:

“Loud Twin Stars”: Okay, this song/video just establishes their rock credentials. “Story”-wise, it may be intended to show them before being “discovered”.

“Merrily High Go Round”: They’ve been discovered and signed, and their handlers are trying to force them into a certain image, and certain roles. Hence, the robotic actions.

“Take My Chance”: As mentioned, a straight sendup of idol singers.

“Monopoly”: Here’s where the lead singer of a popular band starts thinking that she is the band. This is actually the only song where the lyrics really seem to match up with the video. The theme of the lyrics is “let’s be selfish”. The video demonstrates conflict between the singer and the rest of the band (through the alternating verses between the singer and the drummer, and the singer acting like she’s better than the rest of them). I love the symbolism when they’re playing poker, and each of the instrumentalists throws down a King, and then the singer throws down a Queen and acts like she’s won. This is also the first video where the $ dollar sign shows up actually in the video itself (aside from the transitions).

“ロールプレイングライフ” (“Role Playing Life”): Oooo, rumors of internal conflict have leaked to the fans! The record company makes them record a song/video that shows solidarity! Big dollar sign on the flag! Gotta protect those revenues!

“Fragrance”: Now, let’s make them record a power ballad! Big hit! Money rolls in! Though I will admit that I have a second interpretation of this particular song. This is the only video from the album that I’ve shared with my 70-year-old mother, because I felt like it perfectly illustrated what she went through when my dad left her for a younger woman after 32 years of marriage (my dad’s wife [she doesn’t get the title of “stepmother”] is only 9 years older than me). The alternation between the lead singer’s verses and the drummer’s verses perfectly illustrate the combination of grief and rage I saw my mom go through. And then, the standing up and putting him behind her, and moving on. My mom eventually remarried, and I love and respect her new husband enough to call him “stepfather”.

“Karakuri Town”: Okay, the success of the power ballad has forced the band to stay together, so now it’s time to change their image! I’ve never seen a better illustration of how the media and popular culture tell young women that they have to look a certain way. Just look at how they enter that clothing store and get literally “roped in”. And then get turned into puppets, robots, … dolls. Product.

“おもちゃの兵隊” (“Toy Soldiers”): And now, they’re finally trapped into sticking with the image that the industry/media says they should have.

“Doll’s Box”: No particular interpretation of this song from the video, since it just seems to be a “wrapup”, behind-the-scenes video.

Mind you, my interpretation is based entirely upon the videos, not the lyrics. I’ve read English translations of the songs, and, as mentioned, the lyrics to “Monopoly” are the only ones that actually seem relevant to the respective video. But I understand that things get lost in translation, so perhaps in the original Japanese the lyrics of the other songs match up better with the videos.

As I understand it, they’re touring as DOLL$BOXX. But, like I said, the instrumentalists are one band, and the blonde singer is from another band. The instrumentalists, Gacharic Spin, are, as I understand it, an “indie” band over there. The videos I’ve seen of them don’t sound like this.

Also, Arabella Flynn, I’m not intimately familiar with the Japanese music scene, but I’ve seen some of it. I will confess that I was briefly interested in Morning Musume several years ago, so I get the “idol” thing. But the very first Japanese singer I ever heard was aiko. I was doing a Yahoo search, back around 2000, for pictures of a Japanese actress named Aiko (something or other - I can’t remember her family name now), and Yahoo pointed me at some dude’s personal web site. It was a very primitive site (by today’s standards), but this guy had three links to MP3s of songs by somebody named “aiko”. What the hell, I clicked on them. And instantly fell in love. aiko had an unimpressive voice, but I had never heard such convincing emotion in a voice. The songs were from her debut album, and since it was so early in her career, and Google didn’t yet exist, it was a couple years before I could actually find out what she looked like, so I wasn’t in love because of her looks; I was in love with what she made me feel.

I have a beef with her record company, because they took forever to create a presence on YouTube, and when they did, they made YouTube take down all of the unauthorized aiko videos, and replaced them with “short versions” (basically, abbreviated clips) of her videos. That pissed me off because, once I discovered her and fell in love, I sought out ways to legally purchase her CDs. I found a legit source, and bought all of her CDs, at $30+ a pop. I probably spent over $200 to do that. They would have never gotten that money had somebody not “illegally” posted links to her songs back in 2000. Letting all of her videos appear, in full, on YouTube would only make them, and her, more money. Especially if people see her live performances. She has one of the tightest backup bands I’ve ever heard, and she’s an amazing live performer.

One of the most amazing things I saw in one of her live videos was when … she forgot the words. Mind you, she writes all of her own songs. So she’s performing a live concert at the Budokan, and it’s being filmed, and she forgets the words to one of her own songs … and she made the decision to leave that on the final DVD. That particular show was filmed over two different nights - she could have chosen to use the performance from the other night, but, no, she left her fuck-up in there, for everybody to see. She forgot the words, and was obviously horribly embarrassed (to the point of tears), and she just left it there for everybody to see. She did the same thing on her CDs. She’d go out of tune and … that was the final take. That impressed me. She left her mistakes right there for everybody to hear.