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WARNING: Consists of badly made screencaps from badly made bootlegs, and
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Tierra, 1994
L'arc~en~ciel maintained their "darker" sounds from Dune period in their second album Tierra, although
the inclusion of pop-ish numbers like Blurry Eyes should have warned the more hard-core fans of things to come.
However, songs like All Dead and Inner Core (guest-staring Hyde's maniacal laughter) managed the transition well
from gothic to pop-rock.
Caps come from Blurry Eyes PV; simply because in my opinion Hyde looked his best in this among all the other
Tierra PVs. There is little drama in this PV. Everyone simply cavorts around the carnival ride. It is ironic
that he looked most Western in an era before he was acquainted to this wonderful technology called "contact
lenses". It's probably all the lighting, which also serves to perpetuate the belief that J-rockers do not have
noses.
I supposed he might have cut his hair by the time of this video, because the thing that hang down from
his brow looks fake. Or dead. Or maybe it is simple bad real hair. However, he did appear in And She Said PV
(which I assumed was shot at a later time) with waist-length straight, healthy-looking hair. I guess only
a full-time fan (which the author is not, having to work and study to support her access to fangirlism)
would be able to pinpoint exactly when he did cut his hair to the neck-length style we see later in most of the
Heavenly era.
On a side note, Blurry Eyes is the OP theme to an old anime called DNA2. It basically marked L'arc's
departure from an (almost) unwritten rule of the world of hard-core visual kei: don't go the pop (easy) way. On the other
hand, with Tierra, the band was already starting to turn away from VK. In fact, after Heavenly (the last time guitarist/main
composer Ken was seen with make-up and clean-shaven), the look of L'arc~en~ciel was unequivocally that of
a pop-rock band, with a pretty vocalist, rather than a bunch of heavily made-up men like Kagrra.
On to Heavenly Era
Back to Dune Era