Luna Sea

Luna Sea were the definitive visual kei band of the '90s, rivaling even X-Japan, with whom they had a master-pupil relationship -- two members of X-Japan, which itself split in mid-'90s, discovered Luna Sea in 1990. Luna Sea's sound was firmly based in '80s hard rock, but the band had a versatile, almost proggy approach to songwriting, and its softer side, displayed later on in the group's career, proved equally strong. The band was formed in 1989 as a quintet initially named Lunacy. Guitarist Shinobu "Inoran" Inoue and bassist Jun "J" Onose were high-school buddies, who met Yasuhiro "Sugizo" Sugihara (guitar and violin) and Shinya Yamada (drums), former members of Pinocchio, while slacking off during their college days in the Tokyo area. Adding Ryuichi Kawamura of Slaughter on vocals, the band started playing small clubs and doing demo records, of which they managed three before the end of the year. They switched to the Luna Sea moniker in 1990, already having established a substantial following in Tokyo. That was when Hideto Matsumoto, the lead guitarist of X-Japan, heard them, and soon they were signed to the cult visual kei label Extasy Records of X-Japan's drummer, Yoshiki Hayashi, who also produced the band's debut eponymous LP (1991) -- the only one not to chart with Oricon. A sold-out tour in 1992 helped them to get a contract with Universal, and after that, things went in an upward spiral: second album Image (1992) scored number nine on the charts; its follow-up, Eden (1993), got to number five; and Mother (1994), written in isolation and considered by many fans the top artistic achievement of Luna Sea, stopped one place short of the top. In 1995, the band took a yearlong breather from recording, and then made it: Style (1996), Shine (1998), and the...