Review | DRINK ME “The New World”

DRINK ME revamped their sound, visuals and even Daiki Yamashita’s singing style changed for “The New World“.

DRINK ME consists of Daiki Yamashita (vocals), Toshiki Masuda, Yoshimasa Hosoya, and Yuki Kaji. The band is part of the FlyMe Project created by Exit Tunes and Xarts, bringing together seiyuu and real visual-kei artists.

The band debuted in 2015 and is on hiatus since 2017.

Tempo estimado de leitura: 5 minutes

Title: The New World
Label: PONY CANYON / Exit Tunes
Release date: 06/12/2017
Genre: Visual-kei Rock

Tracklist:

1 - The New World
2 - EAT EAT EAT
3 - The New World -instrumental-
4 - EAT EAT EAT -instrumental-
5 - 渦潮の過去 [DRAMA TRACK]
6 - 嵐太朗の疑問  [DRAMA TRACK]
7 - 電の兄弟 [DRAMA TRACK]
8 - 夕凪の写真 [DRAMA TRACK]

Track by track analysis:

1 – The New World

The title track “The New World” brought to the spotlight shredding guitar riffs, fast-paced punk-rock-inspired drums and thunderous basslines.

Synths took the backseat for this song, a big departure from DRINK ME’s original sound, however, those still had their spotlight in the chorus, serving as interesting accents to this rock tune.

The song counts with 2 awesome solos, the first, more like a pre-solo is handled by the bass and the second one is shredding masterclass on guitar.

On the vocal end, Daiki Yamashita changed completely his singing style. Rentarou stopped having a higher-toned singing style, going the opposite way, lowering the tone, sounding quite dramatic.

2 – EAT EAT EAT

“EAT EAT EAT” brought a dirty, slow-paced guitar intro, quickly shifting its tone for the increasingly speedy verses. Guitars take center stage for this song, with the bassy drums and punchy bassline painting the background as Daiki Yamashita further changed his singing style.

The chorus is explosive, with the vocals taking over the duty of hyping up the listener. The guitar solo in the bridge counts has a lot of effects going on, an interesting shout to the band’s synth-driven sound in their self-titled CD released in 2015.

On the vocal end, Daiki Yamashita tries faux baritone for the first time. He does end up sounding pretty deep – for his usual singing range – while making a bit of an effort on sounding edgy throughout.

Final considerations

Much has changed for DRINK ME for their 2^nd CD. “The New World” is, indeed, a new chapter for the oshare-kei band.

Their sound, visuals, and even Daiki Yamashita’s singing changed drastically for this release.

Alice Nine’s guitarist Hiroto was brought in to revamp the band’s sound and thus, the heavy electronica and “cutesy” vibe in DRINK ME’s songs in their debut CD were replaced by fast-paced pop-punk and Daiki Yamashita found himself singing in the style of Alice Nine’s frontman, Sho.

It’s no understatement when I tell you that if you hit play on “The New World” when a fan of Alice Nine was close by, they would immediately tell you it is, indeed a song of theirs. Hiroto not only brought his composition skills to this project but completely made DRINK ME an Alice Nine copycat band.

Nothing wrong with that as I actually love Alice Nine’s music but the purpose of the visual-kei artists helping craft the music for the bands in FlyME Project wasn’t on making – in this case DRINK ME – almost sound like a covers band instead of its own thing.

That is something I consider to be the downside to DRINK ME’s complete change in sound. I do welcome the change in sound to some extent, after all oshare-kei is not a sub-genre of visual-kei that I enjoy beyond listening to it once thus, to find DRINK ME with the same upbeat tone but donning a different sound was refreshing and welcomed.

“EAT EAT EAT” certainly embodies much of what oshare-kei is all about. The playful melodies and the bright lyrics retain the band’s identity.

The biggest change came by way of Daiki Yamashita’s vocals. He does not sound remotely close to how he did in 2015 for DRINK ME’s self-titled CD.

He shifted his singing from higher-toned and upbeat to lower-toned and intense. This, of course, was possible to pull off because Yamashita does have the range and technique necessarily for such a dramatic changing in singing tone + style.

He’s much more dramatic in this CD as well, something that, due to the fact that the band is emulating Alice Nine, comes as no surprise.

DRINK ME are still sounding different from MEDICODE in “The New World” however, they now are closer to being an Alice Nine covers band than having their own, distinct identity. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this is a bad or a good thing.

“The New World” is available for purchase at CDJAPAN.

description (Title subject to change)

DRINK ME