Moran
Replay

The Moomins are the protagonists of a famous series of novels and illustrated books in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, but much less known in Southern Europe: they are white, gentle forest spirits with a simple and chubby shape. In their valley lives a strange ghostly figure that turns anything she touches with her hands or steps on with her feet into ice: this cursing burden keeps her, against her will, away from all the other Moomins, even though she desires their affection. This melancholy, cold, deeply melancholic figure is called Mårran (the "å" is pronounced "ó") and is the source of inspiration for Hitomi to found the fourth stage of his artistic journey, the Japanese visual kei group Moran.

Hitomi is an emblematic character who combines a grainy and dusty voice with a wide vocal range and deep expressive and interpretative ability. In his previous experiences, he had already demonstrated a powerful poetic streak with lyrics of dark and perverse beauty fused with complex and structured melodies: in Fatima, he achieved peaks of absolute lyricism as in Tsumugi ito ("Thread of Silk") combined with moments of a certain madness, like in Drea Mers. When Fatima dissolved in 2005, Hitomi (also known as Sanaka and Kanoma) and his trusted drummer Towa (now known as Soan) decided to try again three years later by recruiting guitarist Velo and bassist Zill to form Moran. The four hit it off with a bang: the first single, Element, is exceptional, not a beginner's lucky strike, but a record with remarkably mature and dense tracks, and the three subsequent releases also show that we are dealing with a top-notch band that combines refined indie sounds with enjoyable and original dance rock influences. After the first four singles, Moran released two albums in 2009: one for the Japanese market of new material titled Heroine, and another for the European market, a collection of the four singles, each with three tracks, forming the compilation Replay.

The four singles were structured so that each featured a melancholy ballad (the title track), a power pop song, and a hard rock track, so that Replay ends up representing each category four times. The album is excellent: the 12 songs compose a mural that is both homogeneous and heterogeneous in their style; since the expression "visual kei" always identifies an attitude rather than a genre, even though most bands lean towards metal, not all necessarily do: here, we have an alternative leaning towards dark, but not black and dark, but paradoxically bright and white. That dramatic and nihilistic charge, akin to the Cure's Pornography, is present in the lyrics, written from an "I" that always seems like Mårran, yet diffused like sugar in water in a light and dreamlike music. The contrasting effect is perceptible even solely in the music, even without understanding the words: the melancholy is palpable, yet it is lightened by the symbolic division of song parts, where there is always a moment when one feels the need to escape the gloom for a better, or simply more aware, state, and that moment is the bridge between the verses and the chorus. Even though he only signs the lyrics and never the music, Hitomi's influence in his bands is evidently powerful on the melodic level as well since there is a recognizable fil rouge between Fatima and Moran tied to the transition between song parts as the moment of awareness, of epiphany, of the dawn that separates the darkness of the night from the dissipating light of the day. As the lyrics suggest, this means that the chorus frees from the self-pity expressed in the verse and that, through the bridge, one attains a sort of global view, that sense of an overview of sad events that usually only comes long after they have occurred, as also mentioned by Souseki Natsume in Pillow of Grass. A colder, more logical way of seeing compared to the warm excitement of the moment. Of course, not all the songs aim so high: Moran's productions also include phenomenal tracks for pure entertainment, such as the extraordinary and enjoyable Party Monster or Sea of Fingers, as well as more rock moments, like in Hameln or LOSERS'THEATER, but the introspective charge that pervades extraordinary tracks like Element and Kimi no ita gosenfu ("It Was Your Score") makes this band always recognizable and achieves exceptional, moving artistic outcomes.

A final aspect characterizing Moran and perfectly expressed in Replay is their endless elegance: every Moran track is imbued with a strong coldness, even the lighter ones always seem to be performed with a certain winter and composed mood. This dignity is then complemented by a visual choice, both in artwork and stage costumes, marked by absolute refinement without any fear of veering into the radical chic: here too, Hitomi's personal imprint is evident, given the continuity of the looks adopted in his four bands (the first two, Alicia and Le'cheri, were small, unproductive experiences) and marked by fundamentally sober clothes, of noble and tailored taste, then rendered baroque or even flamboyant by fantastic or fairytale-like details such as large veils, flowers, branches, lace, ribbons, fluffy layers of lightweight fabrics, jabot, and every kind of garment, strictly white or in muted and pale tones, that makes their image foggy, vague, more tied to a sort of memory of the past than to an actual current dimension. Perhaps it is precisely this icy and imagined/imaginary world where Moran's poetry takes the stage: after the farewell of guitarist Velo and the sudden death of the bassist Zill, the surviving Morans found a new bassist, Sizna, and managed to piece together a core to carry forward the snowy and icy images evoked by Hitomi's lyrics.