Hi all! This is my very first post here, and I’d like to thank Arie for inviting me to contribute!

I’ll tell you a little about myself. The name’s Alisa. I’m a 19-year-old college student (I’m sure you all care *so* much about this) and a huge fan of Japanese music. My main blog can be found here. I figured some shameless plugging wouldn’t be TOO harmful! Ehehe. (hides from angry mob)

On my blog, I mainly review music. I try to talk a lot about artists that not many people know about, because I think all artists deserve a fair chance to be noticed. The genre I talk about with the most frequency is Visual Kei. Yeah, you read that right. Now I’m sure you’re baffled as to why a Visual Kei fanatic is writing on a k-pop blog. I wanted a challenge, so there you go.

About a week ago, I had a conversation with a few friends via Twitter about something I had often wondered about: the existence of Korean rock music. You hear a lot about cutesy k-pop acts all the time, but there’s not much of a rock scene to be found. You’ll even see the lack of awareness/popularity on the k-rock Wikipedia article, a pitiful blurb at best. It’s odd to me that there really is NOTHING in the way of rock in Korea!

Still, through a bunch of Youtube spelunking with friends, we discovered that there are some Korean rock bands out there, and good bands at that! I’ll profile a couple, for your amusement.

The Trax
Being arguably the most well-known of not well-known (paradox much?) k-rock acts, The Trax is obviously influenced by the Visual Kei style of dress popular in Japan. They add rap bits to their music, and still sound quite a bit like a boy band rather than a rock band. I’m not going to call this Girugamesh meets TVXQ but… I’ll admit that the Korean language sounds a little awkward in rock music, after being bombarded with k-pop and ONLY k-pop for a long time.

EVE
Another visual k-rock band (if you’ll call them that, it just sounds strange) EVE rocks Malice Mizer/Versailles-style regal clothing and have a very dark sound. I was honestly very impressed with this band, despite sounding dated. (which they are)

To Wrap it All Up: I’ve proven that K-rock is an elusive genre, but it exists! Hopefully you’ll be inspired to check out these two bands, and possibly find some others. Happy listening!