Buck-Tick Zone

Original Titles in Japanese

Koroshi No Shirabe

Aku No Hana

Speed

Titles Translated

Koroshi No Shirabe - "Murder Melodies" or "The Melody of Murder"

Aku No Hana - "The Flowers of Evil". This is the title for both a Buck-Tick song and album. The title comes from "Les Fleurs du Mal" by Charles Baudelaire, a favorite poet of Atsushi. In the remix album Shapeless, the title is translated as "Evil Flowers" but most translations of Baudelaire phrase it as "The Flowers of Evil" so that is what I prefer.

Notes

Ranked #1 on the album chart. 330,000 copies sold.

Though no singles were released from this album, Buck-Tick would perform "Oriental Love Story" during television appearances, as if it were a single.

This is one of the rarer times that an album was released on alternate formats. At the time, CDs were the dominant format in Japan, followed by analog cassette tapes. The band had stopped releasing their albums on analog vinyl for a couple albums by this point, which I believe was on trend with the rest of the country moving to CDs. This album was also available on the new digital compact cassette format, which would only last a few years. In 1993 it was also released on mini disc format, which was also new and did better than DCC but sadly MDs would only last about a decade. They were most popular in Japan.

On this album, the band took songs and did more than remaster them as they did previously with Hurry Up Mode--they redid them, both arrangement and recording. This time though, Buck-Tick claimed that they did the songs the way they wanted to, although they did not significantly alter the lyrics. (Some minor changes were made, such as removing backing vocals of "Woo Yeah" in "Moon Light" or removing extra words in the original lyric sheet that are not sung in the song.) They only song whose lyrics were significantly altered was "MAD", and for that it was that the majority of the lyrics are not sung.

The band worked very hard on this album. Their albums are usually recorded in about 500-600 hours but this one took around 1300 hours to record. That's quite a long time considering there's only 24 hours in a day. This determination to get it right resulted in some very interesting versions of the songs. Some songs were beefed up a little bit ("Aku No Hana"), other songs were re-composed entirely ("MAD").

This album features 14 songs, which is the most a Buck-Tick album has ever had at the time of release. Up to now, Buck-Tick had been releasing only 10 songs per album or 11 songs (Hurry Up Mode and Kurutta Taiyo).

This version of "Victims of Love" is the longest song that Buck-Tick has ever released on a studio album.

This album features songs originally released on the albums: Hurry Up Mode (1), Sexual XXXXX! (2), Seventh Heaven (3), Taboo (3), Aku No Hana (2), and Kurutta Taiyo (3).

Their first album from the Indies days was almost named "Koroshi No Shirabe", which is why it is printed on the back of the album. This title notably uses kanji and katakana instead of the current norm which is kanji and hiragana. This could be for various reasons. In recent times, katakana is reserved for foreign words (hence "Speed" is written in katakana) but it also used for emphasis, much like italics in English. However, I do not think that is the reason in this case as even the particle "no" is in katakana. Rather, I think the title using katakana is a throwback to slightly older times when katakana was the norm. This was as recent as pre-World War II. With the previous album, Aku No Hana, the artwork was purposely trying to invoke the feeling of 1920s Japan. That is one such time, for example, when katakana would have been more prevalent than today.

This is the first Buck-Tick album with Kazutoshi Yokoyama as a guest musician. He would prove to be a valuable contributor to the Buck-Tick sound throughout the years as he consistently worked with the band on albums, tours, and in side projects.

Buck-Tick must have been heavily influenced by Enigma's 1990 album MCMXC A.D., which spawned the chanting monks craze, for the only noticeable difference in "Jupiter" is the chant intro.

This is the first album with Takayuki Tanizaki doing the band's hair and make-up. He would go on to work with the band for many years.

This is the first album with Tomoharu Yagi as the band's stylist, who would go on to work with the band for many years. For their previous stylist, business relations were marred by personal relations. (Married and divorced from Atsushi.)

This is the 3rd, possibly 4th, album Buck-Tick recorded at Victor Aoyama Studio. (A previous album was recorded at a Victor studio but exactly which one was not specificed.)

This was the 3rd album to be engineered by Yasuaki "V" Shindoh.

This is the 2nd album to be engineered by Hitoshi Hiruma.

The special thanks section: La Ranarita Azumabashi is a restaurant and Arrston Volaju is a high end clothing brand by designer Kohshin Satoh.

The very special thanks to Jupita (inu) was Hide's pet dog Jupiter. Jupita is the Japanization of Jupiter and inu is the Japanese word for dog.

(I think that this was the last release on cassette as Japan had stopped cassette production around this time, as such, I am not attempting to find out if there was a cassette release and what the catalogue number was for the remainder of Buck-Tick's discography.)

The 2002 remaster has "MAD" as the bonus track. It's only credited that it's from the "Climax Together" live show but there were two dates for that show. It is probably the version on the CD included with the limited edition Climax Together DVD box set but I am not certain as I do not own the remaster.