SHAZNA - 10th Melty Life 8 August 2007
Uploading two albums again today since I wasn’t able to upload one yesterday—sorry guys!SHAZNA was one of the many visual kei bands of the 90’s. Commercially visual kei was going downhill, but a lot of visual kei bands garnered large fan-bases during that time. Bands like Malice Mizer, Dir en grey, Kuroyume, Kaggra, Penicillin—I could go on, and let’s not forget Luna Sea, whose albums were topping charts in the 90’s. SHAZNA was a contemporary peer of those groups. Their music was, for the most part, a little more pop-ish than others. But the label ‘visual kei’ usually says more about a band’s appearance than their actual music, and in that regard SHAZNA drew attention due to their vocalist and front-man, Izam. Cross-dressing is hardly uncommon in the visual kei scene, but Izam and Mana of Malice Mizer set the bar. Izam’s extremely feminine look helped SHAZNA get attention, but the band had substance; there was a mountain of visual bands in the 90’s that looked the part but played crappy music, and SHAZNA was not one of them. Their debut very nearly reached the top of Oricon charts and they would later win “Rock Album of the Year” from the Japan Gold Disc Awards in 1998.The album 10th Melty Life came out after a six year hiatus, during which the members of SHAZNA had each gone off into solo acts. The title is a reference to their debut single, Melty Love, released ten years before this album. It is the band’s final album, as they disbanded for a second time just a couple of years later.