State Craft made one full-length album. It came out in 2000, the band was gone the following year, and people are still writing about the record a quarter of a century later.
The Facts
To Celebrate the Forlorn Seasons has nine songs and runs for about 43 minutes. It was released on CD and on vinyl by Good Life Recordings, with the catalogue number GL067.
The label matters. Good Life was a Belgian label and the home of that country’s metallic hardcore scene, with bands such as Congress, Liar and Arkangel. For a Tokyo band to be on it in 2000 was unusual. One writer has argued that State Craft was treated as an equal by the European scene, which few Japanese bands of the time could claim.
What Reviewers Hear
Descriptions of the record tend to agree. It is metallic hardcore that leans towards melodic death metal: two guitars playing harmonised lines, riffs in the Swedish style of the mid-1990s, and breakdowns in the manner of the American band Morning Again.
The vocals are split. Ohnuki, the singer, shouts in a raw voice. One of the guitarists answers with a higher scream.
Reviewers also point to the words. The lyrics deal with the shortness of life and with hope, and they do it through fantasy imagery. The titles give the flavour: “Ecliptic Horizon,” “Freedom Not Enslavement,” “Into The Snowlight Gate.”
That last title echoes the band’s earlier EP, with its Snowlight Garden of Eden. State Craft had its own vocabulary, and it used it across releases.
The Reputation
In 2019 the album was uploaded to YouTube by a fan, and the Asian hardcore site Unite Asia ran a piece about it. It quoted a label owner, who said the release had single-handedly changed the face of the country’s hardcore and metal scene.
A later Japanese review called it a historic record, the bridge between 1990s metallic hardcore and the melodic metalcore of the 2000s, and gave it 95 out of 100.
Finding It
Original CDs change hands for modest sums. The vinyl costs more. The album has also been made available on the main streaming services.
Why It Matters
Scenes need a reference point, a record everyone agrees on. For Tokyo’s metallic hardcore this is that record, made by a band that never got to make a second.
For what its members did next, read on.
