Review by That Blue Haired Guy

This mini-album is simply amazing. girugamesh here have perfectly synthesized their heavy metal and electronic elements to create some of the best music of their career. Go Ahead, the lead track on this disc, instantly became my favorite song of their entire catalogue; it is that good. The only down-side to the disc is that it's only got 5 tracks. It makes you want to hear more, to find out what got left on the cutting room floor. If their goal here was simply to reenergize their fans and whip them into an I-have-to-see-this-live frenzy, then mission accomplished.

Miyavi is back after being the ronin guitarist with a highly focused new style and super slick.. let me put it this way: this album oozes the 80s. I mean that in a good way. There are hints of Michael Jackson and Prince and so on. But it's all Miyavi as well and he's having more fun here than ever before. The album is almost entirely in English, which is a great thing here because the songs practically demand that you sing along to anthems like Horizon and Ahead of the Light. If you like funky upbeat guitar driven rock that you can dance to, look no further. Buy a copy for yourself, a copy for your best friend, and one for your mother too.

The evolution of Miyavi continues with The Others. On this one he's traded the infectious 80s-tastic vibe of his self-titled album for an electro-gospel groove with the same kind of slick production, resulting in another highly listenable disc. At the rate he's going, by the time he truly breaks out onto the world stage he'll have such a back catalogue of amazing music that people will wonder how they'd never heard of him before. This one is again mostly in English, which feels natural for Miyavi in a way that it doesn't on Inoran's last few efforts.

Another year, another Miyavi release. So how does this one stack up? This time it seems as if he decided to use an Atari 2600 as a guitar pedal to add a chiptune-y vibe to the album while still retaining the tight production that made his previous two albums so highly listenable. Going into this I had been wondering after all the directions he's pushed his sound where he could go to keep growing as an artist and he surprised me yet again. The electronic elements on his self-titled disc were there to really accent his guitar work; this time his guitar IS part of the electronic elements and it's magic. I can't wait to see where he's headed next.