mixx - HEAVY METAL SWEETS

As the launchpad for so many women in Japan’s metal scene, it can be easy to overestimate the importance of DESTROSE on certain alumni’s later careers. Take Mary's Blood guitarist SAKI. Though she performed with DESTROSE for a year, and the fact her current band was the original DESTROSE splinter group, her recording debut actually came as one-third of all-female trio mixx.

Formed in 2010 in the wake of the great “girls rock” revival caused by the likes of SCANDAL and Stereopony, SAKI’s bandmates were bilingual vocalist (and fellow college student) ASUKA, and drummer JACKSON, then still a high schooler. Over a heady eleven months, the trio churned out four singles and a full-length album before they abruptly split in May 2011. HEAVY METAL SWEETS was their penultimate single.

Conventional wisdom says to flaunt it if you’ve got it, and mixx knew to do just that with SAKI’s guitar work. Both Rojo ryojo, a crunchy slice of garage rock, and the title track lean heavily on her talents, to the extent that ASUKA’s vocals feel like a prelude to the main attraction of the solos. Not to suggest there’s anything wrong with this approach when you have a musician of SAKI’s calibre on hand, but it’s not hard to see why mixx disintegrated when she landed the Mary’s Blood gig.

It’s a tad regrettable mixx didn’t come along a few years later, when the hype around BABYMETAL opened the world’s ears to Japan’s all-female band scene. Their work ethic and linguistic versatility – their self-titled album was released simultaneously in English and Japanese – could have seen them go far. That said, many Mary’s Blood fans would justly argue with that there’s nothing regrettable whatsoever about the way SAKI’s career has panned out, especially as JACKSON has continued to drum with IRIS MONDE and others.