Review: Dir en grey - Dozing Green

I need to get back on track with the reviewing and the thinking of music after Grave of the Sacrifice. I need to return back to something that I can be comfortable in. Much like how I crawled back to Grieving the Dead Soul after the atrocity that was Kagerou. Damn, is every new release this month going to be disappointing as hell?

01. Dozing Green
02. HYDRA -666-
03. Agitated Screams of Maggots [Live]

Dozing Green	A definite different sound from Dir en grey as a band that shows that they can still explore new sounds this late in. It’s a slower moving piece with solid vocals that explodes with 40 seconds to go. It shows traces of older, more musical Dir en grey with the more metallic, rougher edge and combines it in a package so beautiful and brutally melodic no one could resist listening to it once. On first listen it may sound generic but it will grow on you with time.	9/10
HYDRA -666-	A br00tal reimagining of the classic off of Macabre that manages to slow down enough in the right places to make it listenable. The points where Kyo sounds deranged and insane are balanced by musical death and eardrum splitting noise and it all comes together. Somewhat. This could have easily fit in on The Marrow of a Bone with its dark, violent atmosphere but this has more direction than half the tracks on that album. It isn’t as good as the original but it’s still a solid try.	8/10
Agitated Screams of Maggots [Live]	A live version of the single no one likes. The beginning screams and a cappella substitutes for the fact that the lyrics are unintelligible even more so than when it was released and the guitars tend to speed up and slow down. Intentional or not, I don’t know. Don’t care either. B-side lives never really work out.	5/10

The live B-side really drags the score of the single down but the first two tracks are good enough. Dozing Green averages out to about an 8 out of 10 and the version with the English lyrics that appears on Uroboros actually flows just as well as this one. It's almost two years old, so there's nothing else I can really say at this point....

Recommended:
Dozing Green
HYDRA -666-

Score: 74%