Heh, yeah. I dug out some of my older metal CDs and ripped them to my computer for...well, picking and choosing songs to listen to, really. But they're there! Which they haven't been for a while, due to mounting space concerns!

Loudness is pretty good 80s hair metal, yeah. I don't know that I'd listen to them on a regular basis (judging from that one song, always a horrible thing to do). The Galneryus one is similar--although apparently a song was used in Mnemosyne? I've yet to see that, but it seems to fit. Neither band is bad, really--but towards the end of the Metal Phase I was stuck, more or less, on Elvenking, Mago de Oz, and Lumsk--I'm not sure what happened other than my usual taste drift. Now I listen to stuff like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZPB09U-394 and I think it broke me. I fell out of the Metal Cool Club, I think, and pledged my soul to Chiaki Ishikawa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3j-UQNYiiE (if the song doesn't send chills up your spine, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNCXiMt1bR4 that will). Sorry for rant/music linkage/being a stubborn stick-in-the-mud bastard. :(

Having only ever heard of X-Japan (and not actually heard) out of those bands, I'm not exactly at a good place to make that judgement call. I know one person in my Japanese class was into the black metal underground scene. He was the only one who understood when I started talking about Detroit Metal City, but only because one of his favorite band's singers was playing Krauser II. Which is a shame, since it's probably the best metal-pastiche since This Is Spinal Tap. Certainly more bizarre. And I know when it came to metal, I always preferred the ones that did more inventive things, like folk/symphonic metal. I still am deeply impressed by Therion's Summernight City cover, though.

In sum: my experience is that Japan frequently doesn't care about genre (and trying to stick some artists I like in a genre gives me headaches), which I see as a really nice thing to do.

Japanese metal (at least in the European sense, I suppose) kind of doesn't exist; a lot of metal-ish music goes into visual-kei, which is extremely polarizing: you either like that genre, or you don't. Onmyouza isn't visual-kei, although they do go up on stage in traditional kimono and rock out--they're 80s-sounding metal (usually compared with Judas Priest) with a Shinto folk influence. Surrounding the anime fandom, there's also a lot of interesting stuff, from Sound Horizon, best described as "whatever genre Revo thinks is appropriate at the moment", which can range from symphonic metal to, uh, Irish folk with bagpipes. The doujin music community (from which Sound Horizon came) is full of that kind of stuff, from pure metal remixes of Touhou and other game themes (UI-70, =NeutraL=) to really nice classical/modern hybrids (I'm thinking Yuki Kajiura and her cohort of talent) that don't quite get to "metal" in sound necessarily but hit that same nerve of "awesome" for me.

Yeah, I attend UK. Or, uh, did, I guess--I just graduated. I haven't listened to a lot of the music that last.fm is telling me we have in common for a while (save for Lumsk), but that's more because I'm in a "explore Japanese music" mode more than anything else. I have hilariously nonsensical taste. I think. Perhaps I don't!

Not on last.fm?

Hi! You are a person who has requested Internet Friendship with me, yet I know not of who you are or why! This is not a problem; I am merely somewhat more confused,.dazed, and disoriented than I usually am.

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