Art Cube - Art Cube

Art Cube [Collection Album] (12/22/2010)

Purchase at CDJapan

01. u.b.u.g.o.e
02. rengechuu
03. kaigenkyo (new song)
04. Pain~wing...
05. rurisame (remastered)
06. kumo ni shibarareta 12 no kyoukai
07. hanahikage~Petal~
08. Blue Heaven
09. False prayer (kind of new song)
10. Soaring awakening
11. you're here...
12. niji ni sarawarete ~mu no kaihou e~ 

Art Cube recently put out another collection album. There are only 2 new songs (for the Western fanbase that is) on the album and everything else has been released already. Why would they do this? Probably because they've been around for 3 years and haven't put out a lot of material, so their older works are all of out print. Thankfully they were able to put some new stuff on their, unlike E'm~Grief~, and the kind of new song is from a live-distributed single that was given out in August.

As far as I could tell, none of the songs were remastered other than track 5. To be honest, I only extracted the songs I didn't already have and deleted the rest of them. With that being said, I liked both of the new songs: a lot actually.

"戒幻郷" is the only entirely new song on the whole album. I didn't find samples of it, or rather I didn't even look, of this song, so I didn't have any expectations for it whatsoever. The song starts off in a similar fashion to "虹化鏡" in which there is a lot of orchestrated voices, along with low guitar and bass. This song is definitely one of their more dark-themed ones because of the foreboding aura the song has a whole in both the orchestral arrangement and from Z's vocals. The main chorus of the song is alright: it's not very catchy, but there is a lot of interesting going on throughout it. This is one of the rare songs where the rest of the song is more interesting than the chorus to me. Overall, this is a very nice song, and it's a great song to end M's career in the band with. If you like their other symphonic-y stuff, then you'd also like this song.

"False Prayer" is a song that I found samples of a long time ago, but never heard the full version of. I'm pretty sure this was released in the live-distributed CD from back in August. In comparison to the other song that's new, "False Prayer" is much much more rock orientated. I really liked this song from the introduction to the finish because it's pretty different from the rest of their others songs. Z sings pretty similar to how he sang on the D+Sect album, but the rest of the band is able to show off their talent without being cluttered with keyboard arrangements. Strangely enough, I don't think there is even a keyboard part in this song. The drumming in this song has some interesting bass-pedal work, but other than that I think it's a little repetitive. As for the chorus of the song, it has their typical melodic, yet haunting, style to it, just in a more rock setting than I'm used to hearing. "False Prayer" is a good example of how Art Cube can write a diverse number of songs.