Author: Sebastijan Videc
Photos: Jerneja Jerak
Location: Ljubljana / Orto Bar / Slovenia
Concert date: April 13, 2014
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: €20 presale, €25 on the day of the show
Since this Sunday night at Orto Bar had a pretty exotic theme, it’s worth starting with a quick primer on visual kei. The word kei means style, so visual kei, or “visual style,” isn’t a music genre as such but a music movement built around the image of the bands. The genres you’ll find under its umbrella are wildly varied, from punk, rock and heavy metal all the way to pop and electronica. It all started back in the eighties, and the term itself supposedly comes from one of the slogans of the metal band X Japan, “Psychadelic violence crime of visual shock”. In 1986, the labels Extasy Records and Free-Will were founded in Tokyo and Osaka to spread the visual kei idea. From the late eighties to around the mid-nineties, the popularity of visual kei bands shot up, and their albums were selling in record-breaking millions. When some of the main bands broke up, though, interest started to fade toward the end of the nineties. With the arrival of the new millennium, interest began climbing again, and bands formed around 2005 have been dubbed “neo visual kei” by some. Despite the criticism that the new bands care more about how they look than about the music itself, and that all of them sound the same these days, popularity has clearly been on the rise in recent years, both in Japan and elsewhere in the world.
Heidi. first played together in February 2006 in Tokyo. The public really took them to heart after their appearance at a memorial concert for hide. hide was the nickname of a Japanese musician who broke new ground in the late ’80s with his metal band X-Japan, then went on to be regarded as one of the pioneers of visual kei with his solo career, and was an idol of rebellion against traditional Japanese society for young people. After two albums released in Japan, the band signed with the label Gan-Shin in 2009 and, with their third album, started conquering the old continent too. Just a year later, Heidi. signed with the even bigger label Geneon Universal Entertainment and, with the release of their fourth album, began going after the American market as well. Their music has been used in anime as well as in a film about a young farm boy who dreams of becoming a visual kei star, with the band members playing supporting roles too. Their current album Alpha came out in September 2012.
I have to admit I’d never come across visual kei before. So the anticipation on Sunday night was that much bigger: what were the guys from the Far East going to throw at us? Even walking into the hall was strange in its own way, because the crowd packed in and jostling right in front of the stage before the show was mostly female. For a moment it felt like I’d fallen asleep and woken up inside a Japanese anime, full of little teenage girls with brightly colored hairdos and huge eyes. Sadly, the hall was mostly empty, which I put down to people not knowing the style or the band, plus the relatively high ticket price, which surely scared off a few curious folks who might otherwise have checked the show out. But a few minutes past nine, when the band jumped onstage, the small crowd literally exploded. The wooden floor of the hall shook like never before, and not just at the start but through the whole show, which ran a good hour and a half to almost two hours. If the audience couldn’t welcome the band with sheer numbers, they more than made up for it with energy. And as if that weren’t enough, in the second half of the set the band’s Japanese female companion gave the slightly worn-out handful of fans an extra push, and they burned through the last atoms of strength they had left. Visually the band might not be the most extravagant out there: the barefoot guitarist wears face paint (a mild form of corpse paint), the bassist leaps around in a plaid skirt and pants with mismatched legs, and the drummer’s makeup leaves not a single masculine feature on his face. Throughout, though, the band was more than obviously flirting with the female crowd, who took home souvenirs in the form of personalized picks and drumsticks. The music is a whole other story. The start was super explosive, with metal and rock rhythms (a combo of Fender Precision Bass and Stratocaster through Marshall amps) in the verses, which then melted into Japanese pop melodies in the choruses, the part that most reminded me of Japanese cartoons. Over the course of the set the music shifted into slightly gentler rhythms with more pop and punk, and later the rhythms hardened up again. In my opinion, Heidi. played the most interesting show of this year’s edition of Ortofest.
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