Vidoll
Romanesque Gothic

The mini-album under review is by a Japanese group that sings in Japanese.

The Japanese group belongs to the visual kei genre.

Visual kei (literally "visual style") is that genre where image matters as much as music, and often the artists dress in feminine clothes, adhering to an aesthetic ideal where beauty equals woman, so for a man to be beautiful also means to be feminine.

If you've made it this far, skipping those three steps that (rightly or wrongly) prevent 90% of people from getting into Japanese music, then you've already done a lot. In several other reviews of Japanese artists here on DeBaser, I've read scornful comments like "you listen to Japanese music because it's cool" or "you feel more 'in' because you listen to Japanese music." It's not quite like that, because (at least in my experience) saying that I ALSO listen to Japanese music is like saying I'm a nerd or a geek who listens to cartoon theme songs. Since Japan is a country from which Italy is still not importing music, today's fans of Japanese music might feel somewhat like fans of American music a few decades ago: elitist and yet not entirely well-regarded.


Well, after having sinned in a personalistic use of the public medium and having exploited the DeBaser disc as a kind of virtual Freud, I finally move on to the album. The title Romanesque Gothic and the cover that seems like something from the library of Canterbury Cathedral should make you think we're dealing with hard rock with Gothic tendencies, but that's NOT the case. Vidoll is a band constantly balancing between one perspective and another, constantly in equilibrium between one aspect and another, one genre and another, one rhythm and another; even the name "Vidoll" is a complex wordplay that can be interpreted as either "beautiful doll" or "useless puppet" (and their hybrids) at the reader's full discretion. Listening to Vidoll is a perplexing experience as you find yourself constantly not knowing what kind of music they are playing: is it hard rock? Is it glam? Is it metal? Is it rock'n'roll? Is it prog? I've been listening to them for several years and still, perhaps due to my ignorance, haven't managed to categorize them; perhaps the most logical is gothic (tempered with "& lolita"), but then you listen to any random song and get routinely confounded by their boundless flair. What does Romanesque Gothic mean? Romanesque-Gothic? It seems a contradiction, as one contradicts the other. So, naturally, the best definition (if we must find one) is that "visual kei," which means absolutely nothing because it's a category of appearance rather than sound.

I thought a bit about which release to choose to write for the first time about Vidoll on DeBaser: I considered starting with the first album or the recent best, but in the end, I opted for Romanesque Gothic because, in the five tracks that compose it, this mini-album exemplarily expresses the soul of this group. Firstly, the contradiction and ambivalence mentioned earlier, expressed in every aspect, starting with the word/music relationship: for example, [F] Stein to [M] (those angles are the Japanese quotes) opens the album in an enormous, dramatic, epic, triumphant manner, you imagine a tragic melodrama, but then you read the lyrics and discover it talks black on white about child abuse. 6 minutes of confusion, and then comes Ningyo, a very cheerful track and summer single narrating the fairy tale of love between a man and a mermaid. The ambiguity continues with the disarming Miren, which starts as a boogie-woogie and alternates with sharp thrash metal sections all growled, and then the absurd Teddy, dedicated by the singer to his teddy bear (I'm not kidding) with a really sweet and melancholic melody and a hard rock arrangement obviously contradictory. The album ends with Sayonara, a beautiful ballad (???) that serves as a happy ending, sometimes speed metal and sometimes a bedtime fairy tale, continuously interrupted, resumed, slowed down, sped up, softened, rugged, transformed.

The music of Vidoll is therefore based on continuous contradiction with itself and simultaneously on a great consistency in a reasoned fragmentation. The same five members of the band come from similar but antithetical experiences, and together they manage to creatively clash, giving life to a style, I repeat, indefinable: there's a lot of pop in Vidoll, but also the most brutal metal and unusual echoes of classical memories, but listening to them, it's clear they are also connoisseurs of the '70s and what it left to music, and a thousand other things. The lyrics are no less: Vidoll's lyrics talk about everything, from social problems to tragic love stories, from media invasiveness to everyday trivialities and a thousand other things; nothing exploitable is left unexpressed. Romanesque Gothic is exemplary in the Dada game of mixing music and text: the continuous experimentation and continuous mixing, instead of tiring, always work very well and demonstrate the band's eclecticism. Much of the credit goes to the author, composer, and vocalist Jui, with an absolutely recognizable voice that climbs the highest tones (borderline for a man) as well as coming down really low and has an absolutely theatrical expressiveness, but also bassist Rame, always dressed like a 19th-century porcelain doll, with his incredible and acrobatic arrangements demonstrating the great and enviable technical ability of this band. I don’t know if Vidoll will ever sell in Italy or perform here, but I know it's a great band capable of making its voice heard in the realm of international art rock, and that’s enough for me.