Album

The BiS MV Arrived and Is Everything a 90s Kid Could Hope For

/ Homicidol Maniac / Leave a comment

We did it! Despite the very best efforts of the world to destroy humanity before the new decade was more than a few hours old, we got to the day when the full album of the fully rebooted BiS came to fruition with the MV that will lead it into the sales wars. And what an MV! Maybe you saw it during yesterday’s aborted leak. Maybe you saw enough that, when combined with the title, you had no choice but to think of certain late-90s punk touchstones and tributes to an aesthetic that never should have died. I don’t want to say that every little thing in it is completely deliberate, but come on. Just look at this:

Yep, that definitely hit all of the right notes. Maybe the only thing truly missing is one of the actors suddenly having their face twist into a horrifying hell rictus, or a lo-def shot inexplicably shaking and turning to convey wackiness or something. Otherwise, from colors to setting to styling to the exploitative use of little people in the guise of show business icons, I’m back in the waning years of rock music’s last best decade.

And the music? Well yeah, that’s good too. I think we all figured that’d be the case, right? Like, they got the less saucy stuff out of the way on the last album preview — given all the rest of their body of work so far, for BiS3 to drop anything less than an all-out punk barrage would be the biggest surprise of all. And yeah, all in all I do think that this album has shaped up to be the best by a group named BiS in quite a while, though we should wait for the official release just in case Watanabe decides to pull some shenanigans.

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All-but-final Songs and Details on the New BiS Album

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Ah, and now we reach the point in the promotional machine when a new release (specifically, a WACK release) is laid almost completely bare before the world and all of its details are known and we get to speculate wildly about what might fill the otherwise-empty informational crevices. Behold, the new BiS album, now more than just a bunch of stuff on Soundcloud:

A title! A track list! A … a cover that looks a lot like it’s really playing up an appropriate punk rock association while also trying very hard to avoid being sued by Green Day! Good lord, after these tracks, there’s just the one left to show off, and it could also be a Green Day reference if you’re willing to stretch a little, and I’m guessing that’s where the MV will come from, the only question really being when, it being a real shame that we’re still more than a month from the release date, I say again.

But let’s listen to the new songs, which you can also still download for a hot minute (I’m sorry!): Continue reading →

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Let’s All Appreciate the Week That Maison book girl Just Had

/ Homicidol Maniac

This is the other big item from earlier in the week that I wanted to make sure to highlight, like really highlight, and I’m doing it wantonly because it’s a lot and they deserve it. Yeah, I’m talking about Maison book girl, who I still can’t believe I write about as favorably as I do nowadays after quite a long time of both pretending that they didn’t belong and being too xylophone-reliant to take all that seriously. Here we are!

The point of the post, though, is to acknowledge that Maison book girl released an album earlier this week, and it is excellent, the kind of high art that I think just enough of idol has embraced. They also, in conjunction with that release, dropped a couple of MVs that you may or may not agree are the best songs on the album, but I read the selection as “these songs sum up the album go buy it.”

The first, from the day of the release itself: Continue reading →

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Hey! Go Get These Other Excellent BiS Songs!

/ Homicidol Maniac

Thank the gods for some down time! I’ve been dying to get a few minutes to really catch up on some of the excellent things that happened in idol this week, the latest couple of pre-album track releases by BiS among them. Friends, they do not disappoint.

First things first, if you know what’s good for you, take advantage of the fact that you can download these things and have them:

Should you need additional convincing (like, if the last one of these pre-releases didn’t have you absolutely twitterpated), just listen to these suckers. I will warn you, though, that this is music of excellent quality, one of which will threaten to put you in the hospital. Continue reading →

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This Is My Favorite Kind of EMPiRE Song

/ Homicidol Maniac

Next up in the Brief Run of Posts So Maniac Can Feel Better about Himself: EMPiRE! Who released this latest MV from their new album and went the extremely easy-but-effective-because-this-is-how-idol-works route with it. Wherein, in fact, key schisms within Team are laid bare, as Kerrie was like “oh you can just put that in the Weekender, it’s just one of those member retrospective montage things” and I was like “what’s that? I was too busy crying into a pillow to hear.” Yes, I happen to love these kinds of videos, and with them exactly this kind of song, which I believe is now canonically known as The ODD FUTURE Method.

The new album is out! The tour is wrapping up! WACK has things cooking and we’re only hours away from something that’s probably going to make people mad! It’s only a week until Christmas!

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Aptly Named Zenkimi Blast from the Past

/ Homicidol Maniac

This time last week, while we were putting the final organizational touches on this year’s Best Of crop, two things occurred to me. The first was that this year, for various reasons, seemed to have the lowest high points out of the whole dang run of Homicidols Voting Things (probably because of all the soul-murdering graduations); the second was that Codomomental units were, on the whole, involved in the proceedings but without the same degree of they-could-win-so-much-hardware-you-guys as in past year. And on that second point, yeah, I get it, there’s actually been a good amount of turmoil in my favorite company for the last however long, and it’s unfortunately sort of stifled their mental and emotional presence for folks outside of Japan. I think so, anyway, but I’m also not as elbow-deep in the scene nowadays, so maybe I’m missing things.

Now, on Saturday, while I was taking a few minutes to just cruise around and check out things that I might want to pick up later in the week, I ran head-long into a preview clip for this MV. I didn’t read the tweet, and I didn’t play the clip with audio on, but I remembered that what has turned out to be one of the greatest chika loudol groups of all, Zenbu Kimi no Sei Da, did indeed have an album on the way, and that album was going to be a special one, and you know, I got excited. And I took that tweet and I slapped it into a draft post and I was going to publish for Monday a piece on how excited I was about this album and you should be too.

And then I didn’t do it because that’s reality these days. But I actually remembered to come back to it, and my girl Yotsu was doing what idols do and re-sharing the thing that had already been shared and then it all came together for me, the power and the glory amen: Continue reading →

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When You’re Watanabe, Your Week Has a Theme

/ Homicidol Maniac

WACK never sleeps, apparently, and nor does its somewhat eponymous founder have time for your shenanigans or judgment. In fact, he stacked up extremely Watanabe moments for the week and delivered like has never seemed possible — and it’s only Wednesday, good lord.

This is a music website, so the most important news is that the latest flavor of BiS (to which I do refer derisively but actually find myself more in love with all the time) is releasing a new album, and here’s the first track, which you can download until the 10th on the link here, and also listen to in perpetuity:

Continue reading →

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This Is How LADYBABY Ends

/ Homicidol Maniac

I won’t get into how this MV landing yesterday set off a wild few minutes of me only half-remembering any of the details related to LADYBABY’s upcoming dismantling except to say that it’s funny in retrospect, but also, man, their end-of-life period caught up to us pretty quickly, didn’t it? We still have a month and change until the final live and farewell re-recording album, but yeah, it’s time to start to wind things down. And what an oddly appropriate song to do it with!

If this is the last thing we ever get from Ladybaby*, isn’t it interesting how it’s the least Ladybaby thing they’ve ever done and the most conventionally idol? I kept waiting for something — anything — more in tune with how the group has all but always functioned, and ne’er was there a whiff of a growl or chant or anything. This is not to say that it’s LADYBABY going out with a whimper or anything (it’s a very nice song), just that it was not the foot forward that I expected at this point.

There’s almost no way this is the very last thing from them, though, and I expect that we’ll be treated to one more true-to-form LADYBABY video that more clearly explicates the content of that farewell record, and leaves a more conventional aftertaste.

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The More HAMIDASYSTEM Changes, the More Totally I Love Them

/ Homicidol Maniac

I was almost all the way out the door yesterday when Team began to rapidly hoot and holler their enthusiasm for a new thing from HAMIDASYSTEM, who it will not surprise you to learn will be appearing in the Homicidols Best of 2019 voting. Seeing as how I was on my way out the door, no man, no matter how much I love this impossible little art project, I wasn’t going to stop. There was pie at stake! And sweet potatoes and the like!

But now that it’s just me and the aftermath of my gluttony to deal with, I can take the time to appreciate what it was that folks were so smitten by, and–

Continue reading →

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Good Things Are Afoot for POPPING EMO

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good lord, is it Wednesday? It was Saturday morning, like, three minutes ago. What the hell happened? Oh right — friends, if you ever get the occasion to have a job that involves board meetings, do something else instead.

So this thing that I wanted to post about on, like, Monday at the absolute latest! Yes, that’s right, POPPING EMO, one of the I-kid-you-not best-sounding things in chika idol who’ve managed to only get a single post to ever mention them directly, have been on my broken radar more lately and, boom, with an excellent payoff — they’re releasing their next album (their third!) in a couple of weeks:

That’s a criminally short clip, but you get the idea — POPPING EMO’s got good things going on there. But that’s not all! Continue reading →

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