>>33187518IRyStocrat here who literally drove home listening to IRyS songs and Suisei songs yesterday. Gonna use reddit spacing for clarity. IRyS has good songs but the songs themselves aren't as good as the best holomems' songs partially because they're a little incoherent. A lot of people dock her for chuuni lyrics that don't sound correct in English, but frankly the lyrics just aren't put together very well. I'm going to sound autistic here, but this kind of stuff really counts for listener experience. Let's use Gravity as an example.
>How to stay afloat in this world and all of its gravity>When every day the pull is grabbing me>And it's easy thinking nobody here's understanding me>Maybe I'm not alone, maybe I'm not aloneThe first two lines here are actually good bordering on great. Gravity <-> grabbing me doesn't seem like it'd be a good rhyme, but in the song it sounds really good. This is important because it's the chorus and it SHOULD have a really good hook. The last two lines literally directly contradict each other though. Is that me being too autistic? I don't think so. It's not as if a listener is going to actively notice and dislike it, but it's going to prevent there being any strong accumulating effect or crescendo happening.
>Those nights when your energy is nowhere to be>Nowhere to be found>Do you see the light or does it feel like abyss?>Oh, it's bottomless (oh, it's bottomless)These are just nothing lyrics. You can call them too chuuni, but in my opinion they're just weak in general. "Nowhere to be, nowhere to be found" is one of the most noticeably weak repetitions I've ever heard in a song and actually actively takes me out of the song. It doesn't help that the verse melody for Gravity is kind of weak, and the song is held up entirely by having a great chorus.
I could do this one by one for all her songs, and they all generally suffer from this: really weak lyrics combined with slightly overbusy songs. But another aspect is that as a total vsinger, they keep sticking to her "concept" but in the most baffling ways. A good example is Here Comes Hope. I'm not going to post the lyrics here, but you can listen to it yourself. The song is nominally about hope but it literally has nothing to do with her singer concept. In fact, it would've made more fucking sense if the song was called Somethingsomething Despair. The song doesn't SOUND like a hopeful song, and then the lyrics do nothing to play with that apparent subversive/deconstructive aspect of it.
On that note, Caesura of Despair is actually good, matches her concept well, isn't overbusy, and the lyrics are probably the best of the IRyS songs even though there are a few weak lines. That's why the song has endured pretty well, besides being her flagship song.
tl;dr: IRyS suffers from bad usage of her concept, bad lyricists, and overbusy songs that lead to a muddled effect that make it hard for casual listeners to glom onto.
