Aliene Ma'riage - Les Soirée Yoru no butoukai

Aliene Ma'riage

Les Soirée 夜の舞踏会/断罪の章～神罰篇

1999/07/23

1. 神罰篇～神々の審判

2. 夜の舞踏会～ル・ソワレ

3. 罪と罰（棄てられた記憶）

4. 禁・ジラレタ思考回路

5. 精神隔離症の『 』と霧遊症の『 』

6. 僕『しもべ』

7. 『虐』～呪ワレタオルゴールノ中デ～

8. 古の愛物語～エンドレス

9. SUICIDE～洗礼の章

Few records are as quintessentially underground visual kei as Aliene Ma'riage's first full-length, at least to me. It perfectly captures the adventurous sound of the turn of the century indie scene in raw form and cranks the atmosphere up to eleven.

The first glimpse I got of this band was on some godawful-quality rip of a VHS released by their label KEY PARTY. It wasn't even a full song, just a blink-and-you-miss-it clip from their only music video but the vocalist looked so bananas in his feathery getup playing with a long dagger against his lips while random gothic imagery (candles, mirrors, fishnet gloves no doubt) floated superimposed onto a video editor's nightmare that, naturally, I had to seek out what this was all about.

Turns out the music was as delightfully edgy as I hoped! Even though Aliene was just a three-piece band, they sure knew how to make some mean noise (that's a compliment). The album is characterized by a very raw but well-produced band sound, to which they applied a heavy dose of cheesy 'spooky' effects, noises and ambience. These elements injected into their usually fast-paced compositions made for some captivating material. Speaking of captivating, we must not forget the secret weapon Kyouka on vocals. Whatever imperfections his voice might have, he fully embraces and utilizes them to strengthen the atmosphere of sickness and lingering insanity, be it strained cracking melodies or just downright batshit screeching (trust me, you rarely hear anything like this).

It's hard to pick standout tracks on such a unified album that best works as a whole, but the powerful and catchy "Shimobe" (for which they made their sole promo video) and the relentless despair-ridden aggression of the epic closer "SUICIDE" are worth mentioning even among the greats of visual kei history. For anyone curious about the sound of the late '90s underground at its most potent, this release is a must-listen (the 1st press version has a different shorter tracklist so make sure to hunt down the 2nd press with 9 tracks!).