Until the tail end of last year I'd barely heard of 'Dir En Grey', but that all changed when we came across their bizarre and disturbing video for the 2003 song 'Obscure'...
From there it was but a short step to the 2018 album 'The Insulated World' and very quickly to buying tickets to see them play to a sell out crowd at the Islington Assembly Hall (somewhere we've never been before).
We knew they were playing the new album in full, plus the new single and a couple of other tracks so we were able to concentrate on listening to what we knew we were going to hear. That was very helpful because easy listening Dir En Grey are not. Strangely though, once you listen to it a while, it seems to click - particularly the new album, which is a bit catchier than some of their albums.
Unusually Dir En Grey did not have a support band, and we managed to find out that they would come onstage at 8:30pm, so we arrived about 7:50pm and scoped out the merchandise before finding a good place to stand.
The crowd was a mixed bunch to say the least, and included at least one transvestite and a few bath dodgers... Dir En Grey obviously attracts all sorts of people, and I can well imagine they are some of these people's 'favourite' band. They are a bit like Meshuggah in that the people who like them seem to really like them, perhaps because you have to invest in them to even 'get it'...
Their performance, or rather Kyo's performance because it is him you end up watching the whole time, is intense and somewhat overwrought but effective at the same time. They also have a video screen which is quite cool, it's content quite effective although here it is placed too low and obscured by the drums quite a bit.
Seeing Dir En Grey isn't cheap, £46 each indeed... but this was better than every gig I saw last year so I won't grumble too much and the Islington Assembly Hall is a cracking venue too. Unfortunately we missed the 10:24pm train so we had to wait for the 11:05pm which meant we didn't get home until about 1:10am...
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