12012 - Knight mare

12012
Knight mare
2004/11/03

1. nightmare
2. 浸色
3. Aren't you dead yet?
4. Sheep
5. 灰降ル躰

Straight out of the mighty UNDER CODE lair, 12012 married all the sounds and moods perfect for a good time if you were looking for angsty visual kei at the time.

12012 was always just kind of "there" for as long as I can remember, so it's hard to pinpoint how I exactly stumbled upon them, but I distinctly remember the music video for "icy~cold city~" so that must have been one of the catalysts for me. They looked pretty cool in their cyberpunk getup and the music sounded decent too. By that time they were already relatively well-established in their (otherwise short) indies-label career, but for what we're looking at today we need to spin the clock back a bit.

The guys must have really liked the mini album format (or EP or maxi-single, depending on your definition), because that's pretty much all they released their tunes in for quite a while. To me, the crowning achievement of their early years came in the form of a three-EP concept series towards the end of 2004, of which "Knight mare" is the middle one. I'm gonna be honest, I could have chosen any of them, the quality is equally high, but I had to go with this one because it has my favorite 12012 song of all time, "Shinshoku"!

This banger bursts right in after a quick and ominous distorted intro, showing the band's strength in blending heaviness and catchiness, from the hard drivin' guitar interplay to the shouty hooks. Already you can hear some tasty atmospheric guitar effects maintaining an eerie somber mood on top of the aggression. This melancholic trace carries over and blooms fully in the next track, a dramatic hard rocker with a more restrained approach. To me, that's where 12012's greatness came from: an uncanny knack for infusing their music with a kind of beautiful gloom that lent a very particular taste to whatever that came out of their hands, but they didn't go overboard with it.

The signature style doesn't let up in the second half either. Both remaining tracks almost mirror the beginning of the EP, with a more in-your-face number and a slower but equally as devastating offering. The last song is especially elevated by singer Wataru's raw emotional performance who employs the full array of his capabilities, from whispers through sorrowful melodies to all-out screams, making for an effectively heavy ending.

After delivering their three-release winning streak, the band still had enough fire in them for a couple singles and a full-length album before inevitably "graduating" from the label, and, having been snatched up by a bigger company, starting on their journey of major-label mediocrity... Nevertheless, the old cult classics remain, and their material on UCP still represents a powerful chapter in the mid '00s underground VK scene.