Ok, my review, cross-posted from PM:X^2, and as such cross-posts seem to have a history of getting panties in a bunch here, please apply your de-bunching filter when reading.
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2010.10.06: X Japan / Vampires Everywhere! @ Riviera Theatre
This year, I had already seen two crazy-ass Japanese metal bands (Dir en grey and Boris), and was sort of baffled at the size and demographics of the audiences. Given the bizarre experimental music produced by these bands, they drew crowds three or four times larger than I would normally expect, and also more youth- and female-skewed.
Despite hearing all this weird music and singing along with it, it turns out that most of the audience was not even aware that these bands play bizarre experimental metal. In their minds, they simply play "J-Rock", a "genre" that actually has no requirements on musical style. Instead, as long as you are from Japan, have a flamboyant/androgynous stage presence, and have at least one member who takes his shirt off, then you qualify as "J-Rock", and, regardless of the music you play, can tap into a built-in audience of anime fans obsessed with Japanese culture.
Thus we come to X Japan, one of the founding bands of the J-Rock "genre", or more particularly, the aptly-named "visual kei" genre. Their real-world genre is "melodramatic power metal", but you almost never see anyone refer to them that way. They're usually just some sort of rock band. I get the feeling that very few of their fans would also listen to Angra, even though the musical similarity is high.
After disbanding in 1997, X Japan reunited in 2007, and in the last year, have begun a carefully-engineered plan to invade the United States for the first time. I'm sure that they're the only band in the history of rock music to wait until 28 years after their founding (they're in their mid-40s now) to attempt to cross the pond. During the decade they were apart, there was a generation of US kids being raised on Pokemon, and I guess they saw that bands like Dir en grey were having success tapping into that demographic, so why not X Japan too?
They began their assault with a bizarrely out-of-place booking at Chicago's Lollapalooza in the summer, and then boldly booked a bunch of good-sized theaters for a full tour. Curiosity was getting the better of me. I've probably known their name for 15 years (ever since I got into power metal on the Internet), but never actually listened to their music until I considered going to this show. Then when Vampires Everywhere! was booked as the opener, that sealed the deal, and I just had to go.
Vampires Everywhere! is surely the nadir of heavy metal. If not, if someone engineers a way to take metal even lower than this, then I will nominate that person to the Nobel committee. More a carefully-designed amalgamation of money-making trends than an actual band (vampires + auto-tune + Soilwork + girl-hair + exclamation points = $$$!), it's not so much their existence that's depressing, it's the fact that they are signed and promoted by Century Media, a once-proud record label that in the distant past brought us 'Wildhoney', 'Mandylion', and, if vampires are your thing, 'Wolfheart'. I guess when deciding to pay the buy-on, CM thought "well, what better audience to tap into than one for whom the music is already secondary to their fandom?"
Unfortunately traffic prevented me from seeing anything but their last song. Though who knows, maybe it was their only song, since their only release so far is a 2-song sampler (available exclusively at Hot Topic!) They sounded about as I expected, manufactured Soilwork with the auto-tuned vocals layered in somehow. X Japan granted them a surprisingly impressive lighting array. Crowd seemed mostly uninterested, but I didn't see anything thrown at them as might be expected at many other metal shows.
The first thing I noticed about the crowd was that it was nearly half Japanese. This is in stark contrast to the earlier J-rock bands I'd seen, where most of the audience just wished they were Japanese. I spoke with a guy who was seeing them for the second time, the first being in an arena in Japan in the 80s. The look and age of the crowd indicated that he probably wasn't the only one who could claim that. There were girls dressed as only crazy Japanese girls can dress, ranging from cyberpunk prom-queens to bra-and-panties dominatrixes. I talked with two white guys down from Minnesota wearing Symphony X and Iced Earth shirts (and they recognized my Disillusion shirt, whoa!), but they were among the few obviously "metal" people in attendance. The balcony was closed, and the venue was under half-full, but there may have been close to 1000 people there, which is really a pretty amazing number for a band that has yet to release an album in the US.
So, the show was actually pretty good. The two main guys in the band are the singer, Toshi, and the drummer/pianist/songwriter Yoshiki. The other guys were mostly notable for their hair and makeup, and being short, and thus, difficult for even a tall guy like me to see. Despite his multiple flashy coats and sunglasses that never left his face, Toshi pretty much seems like an old Japanese dude somehow roped into singing for a power metal band. Once he got warmed up though, his voice, while thin, did quite a good job of hitting all the notes. At least 'til the end, when I think what was supposed to be an epic closing wail came to an abrupt sputtering end.
Yoshiki, on the other hand, still has a youthful exuberance and drama about him, and his name was by far the one most screamed by the girls around me. In addition to swapping between his clear drumkit and his clear piano, and repeatedly donning and doffing a variety of full-length cloaks over his bare chest, he also made a couple of fairly disastrous stage-dives. Apparently 80 lb. Japanese girls aren't so good at holding up 130 lb. Japanese men!
Despite their penchant for ballads and melodrama, there was actually significantly less bullshit in their performance than I was expecting. Yes, there was a violin solo, a violin/piano duet, and a drum solo, but nothing egregious. And games with the crowd were kept to a minimum. They did a sing-along ballad or two, but for the most part they must figure that the American audience is more hardcore than the Japanese audience, for they mostly blazed through double-bass metal songs. The light show wasn't at the arena level they'd been used to, but it was more impressive than most shows at a venue that size, and they even had cryo-jets blasting jets of white fog at the end of the set.
The audience was certainly into it, but maybe a little less insane than I was expecting. Sure, plenty of people were jumping in the air with their arms making an "X" above their heads, and it was pretty impressive when the crowd did several rounds of a ballad's chorus on their own. But while I may have seen a girl near me with tears in her eyes, and saw security helping to prop up a woman as they walked her to some air, it wasn't quite Beatles-on-Ed Sullivan weeping-in-ecstasy.
So all in all, it was definitely interesting as a cultural experience, and as a bonus, the musical experience wasn't that bad either!
Neil
Hope to see you in 2011!
I usually listen to domestic metal bands like Vigilante, Earthshaker, Anthem, Loudness, etc. Actually I listen to American and European metal bands a lot as well; Esp., Dream Theater and Fates Warning. I'm not always paying attention to what X-Japan has been lately doing, but the songs like "Dahria", "Rusty Nail", and "Kurenai" blow me away anytime 
