Album

Treat Yourself to This QUEENS Song

/ Homicidol Maniac / Leave a comment

At first thought, when I saw this in my list of good Weekender things, I had no more intention of doing anything else with this QUEENS MV than to do exactly that, feel good about my choices, and move on with my life. But then I recalled the last time I had occasion to celebrate QUEENS in such a way, which in retrospect felt like I was giving them short shrift for no good reason, so I opted to listen to the whole thing:

And friend, I am both very super into this song, but it also made me wonder — is QUEENS pretty much the best thing right now, or what? Continue reading →

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Let’s All Listen to the Trailer for the New 2& Album Together

/ Homicidol Maniac / Leave a comment

The unyielding mess that is human existence in this the Year of Pour Lui 2020 has given us some nice things, you must admit. People liked “Tiger King,” you know? And I used the personally got a bunch of things in order, started working on some cool projects that will hopefully bear fruit soon, got some new toys. Good stuff. On the idol front, despite everything, 2020 has ably followed the every-even-numbered-year-has-lots-of-great-debuts trend, and without saying what they are I’ll say that a few records have even entered my all-time idol top 10, which is very cool. Good things are indeed afoot.

And speaking of good things and all-time favorites, let’s check in on one of the chika scene’s greats and … a new compilation album that releases imminently!

I share this with the caveat that Saki has technically not been one of those idol things in quite some time. Does that bother us? Absolutely not! Have I delivered this same spiel before? Probably! Does it matter? No! Let’s listen to the dang thing! Continue reading →

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A Brief Celebration of One of the Year’s Best Releases

/ Homicidol Maniac / Leave a comment

It’s been a while since Homicidols Dot Com was like the super-timeliest thing in idol. That’s okay! Frankly, the Content(TM) is usually better nowadays, what with adequate time to digest the source and have more nuanced reactions than “aw gee ain’t idol swell!” But this is new territory, I think, for the release I’m referring to is both officially like a month old but also itself pretty much a year in the making even at that time, and basically only happens/ed that way because of a great personal disappointment in the Idolverse. Continue reading →

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Yeah, Another A.N.otheЯ!

/ Homicidol Maniac

Well if this isn’t just about the blastiest from the pastiest thing I’ve seen in a hot minute! Doop-dee-doop, there I was going through YouTube for some extra Weekender stuff, when … hello, what’s this? Why, it’s a new video from DUAL EYE! It’s … it’s A.N.otheЯ! But I– I th– Well what the hell man, let’s play the thing!

Bet you weren’t expecting straight-up idorock

Continue reading →

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This Is and Is Not a Review of NEO JAPONISM’s New Albums and Such

/ Homicidol Maniac

After a few false starts, I finally get around to writing up something approximating a review for “NEO JAPONISM’s new album” that would only have been accurate if I’d waited a minute to include the second album released a mere week later, and then subsequently two additional tracks that appear on neither album but did get MVs. Correct — I waited myself into complete uncertainty as to what or when anything would happen, and then lost impetus for the project. But now that I think we’re safe from any extra releases, why not dig in and actually talk about this stuff? Continue reading →

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Gods Help Me, the New DIE/NING EP Rules

/ Homicidol Maniac

It came as a significant surprise to me that the idol group sitting as subject of this post, who you have by now successfully identified as DIE/NING, has previously received a single solitary mention on Homicidols Dot Com, and at that merely a Weekender item as opposed to even a compulsory getting-to-know-you post. Homicidols Dot Com sincerely regrets the error!

I’m not here today to make up for lost time or anything; I presume that if you need to know DIE/NING, you are then in fact already aware of them, as this weird-ass project has been around for goodness knows how long in one form or another. Not a lot needs to be said! So let’s tell this story as simply as possible. Continue reading →

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In Honor of BABYMETAL, a BABYMETAL Thing

/ Homicidol Maniac

So you’ve probably seen the news, that BABYMETAL, who through no fault of their own have had their entire reason for being (big-ass live shows) ripped out from under them, are going to release their very own version of a double-live gonzo album next week:

This was already announced a while ago, Twitter-diving shows, but it’s new to me dammit!

Good. Great. Grand. Wonderful. This is very much a Weekender item. So why am I blogging a whole-ass post out for it? Because, starters, it’s been a minute since the last time we had good reason to post a BABYMETAL thing, and also because I have now listened to the previews and deemed them good, and because today is a very special day, my very own Fox Day if you will, as it is the sixth anniversary of my first BABYMETAL experience (it was “Megitsune”), which is almost as life-defining as the time I decided to strike up a conversation with the person to whom I am now engaged to be married and also very easy to remember because it’s my brother’s birthday. So in honor of the unofficial beginning of Maniac and the eventual establishment of ye olde website, I blog a BABYMETAL post. Continue reading →

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Nani’n’Nerun? Release World’s Shortest Idol Album, Also Slightly Longer Single

/ chris

Nani’n’Nerun?, that sub-unit of the similarly fond-of-terminal-punctuation idols, You’ll Melt More! are one of the better things to emerge in 2020.  Their name is a pun that sounds like “What do you do?” in Japanese, but that question mark conveys to me, a non-Japanese speaker, a sense of incredulity, as if I can’t quite believe what they have just done.

And I can’t quite believe what they have just done, which is to release a new album, six songs long but clocking in at a total of two minutes and thirty-two seconds.  No that’s not per song, that’s the entire length of the album! It may sound like two teenage girls messing about with GarageBand but sometimes that’s exactly what we need and it’s also the sort of punk rock behaviour we cheer and clap for at Homicidols dot com.  Short Short Songs 1 (and please God let there be a 2) is out now on your favourite digital music platform and you can listen to the entire thing in less time than it takes to read this article.

Thirty-three seconds longer than this album though, is their new single Sky Wah Wah, for which they’ve made another of their fun MVs:

Continue reading →

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Let’s All Listen to New KAQRIYOTERROR Together

/ Homicidol Maniac

Oh heck yeah, this is exactly what I was waiting for — it didn’t take long for KAQRIYOTERROR to go from announcing a new album to promoting the sucker. In true Codomomental fashion, the official window is two hours, and we immediately dishonor that.

More on the flip. Continue reading →

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You Review Things: RAY | “Pink”

/ Homicidol Maniac

Once again actually by Viz Major!

When ・・・・・・・・・ (vocalized as “Dots” or “Dots Tokyo”) emerged onto the idol scene in late 2016 with their shoegaze music and unorthodox presentation, it was a surprisingly much needed breath of fresh air from the saturated market of overcolored aesthetics and systematic cheerful, yet often contrived, songs predominant in idol culture. Along with this new approach to the genres of music that idols perform, the group attached an eccentric mythos to their profile, implementing things like all members are named ・(a single dot) but have nicknames that change every so often and go by themes such as vegetables or even infrastructures (one member was nicknamed “Konbini”, the Japanese word for “convenience store”). Visors were worn over the eyes of the members to conceal their identities, which established them as both an innovative and mysterious idol group. They quickly gained fans in not only the idol spectrum, but also among fans of shoegaze and indie rock outside of the J-pop music sphere, and in 2018 released their debut album『 』(a title with no words but actually 9 half-width spaces), which proved to be one of the best albums of that year. Unfortunately, the following year the inevitable fate which many idols have succumbed to was met, and the group was dissolved after performing a final one-man live at Tokyo Kinema Club on March 24, 2019. Continue reading →

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