I pointed out a few posts ago that I'd somehow never posted an Iris song, even though I'm a big fan, especially of their first album. They were THE hot item in the underground synthpop scene in 1998-1999. And their freshman album is just incredible; there isn't a single bad track on it. As you can see, even from this demo version (which isn't really substantially different from the later official album version; just shorter) they also cultivated a real artsy vocal style and lyrics, with very layered synths that are almost, but not quite, too busy.
Of course, the keyboard player quit after the first album, and was replaced. The sound didn't change as much as you'd think, but their later efforts weren't as consistently strong. Awakening has some good material, but suffers from a definite sophomore slump. Wrath doesn't have anything wrong with it, but somehow... it just bores me, and none of the tracks stand out. After that, I kind of lost track of them—I still have some of their more recent stuff, and I burned it onto my phone so I can actually hear it, but I don't even recall which song goes with which album anymore. With the exception of a handful of stand-outs like "Panic Rev" and "Phenom" I find that I just don't really care that much anymore. Still worth getting; just not worth rapidly collecting and following like in those heady days of the end of the millennium.
Of course, there could be a lot of reasons for that. Maybe I'm just getting saturated. I find that I don't really do that for anyone anymore—but it's also been many, many years since I could fit all of my music on my CD case. Or, for that matter, since I bought most of my music in CD format, for that matter. Maybe I valued it more when it was harder to get, I had an actual physical something in my hands, even if I went ahead and burned it and transferred it to my phone, which is where I do almost all of my listening these days. I dunno. I don't follow De/Vision that way anymore. I lost Erasure and Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys years ago. Same for Apoptygma Berzerk, VNV Nation, Cosmicity, or... I dunno... any of the acts that I latched on to during those "wait; you mean people are still making music of the kind I liked in the 80s?" days of the late 90s and early 00s.
Plus, as anyone can see who glances at recent posts, I've gotten into a lot of weirder stuff lately; acid, trance, hardstyle, synthwave, and more even more esoteric styles here and there.
I can, however, safely predict that I absolutely will NEVER get into speedcore or it's derivatives. Ugh. Why does anyone even do that?
