Your Homicidols Weekender #239

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Good … morning? Profusestest apologies, friends, for your friendly neighborhood Maniac is on the road at a big family to-do and got pulled away from being able to wrap up this post at the normal time, and now I’m rushing it out the door but nothing stops the Weekender I hope you all have a great one it’s Juneteenth and then the first day of summer!

Calm Down

Yeah, BOY MEETS HARU album!

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WAGAMAMA RAKIA Ain’t No Joke

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The WAGAMAMA RAKIA glow-up has really been something to behold, hasn’t it? I would say that the group was always interesting, albeit kind of lost amid a ton of competition in their early years, but they did seem to be moving in the right direction by 2018. Then they add MIRI, start to shift their sound a little bit, and then last year’s WAGAMAMARAKIA effectively sealed them as major breakouts. And now look at them compared to this — Minami and Rin are still there from the beginning, but it’s effectively a completely different group doing different things and still just way the hell interesting and doing musical stuff that seems just a step beyond the cutting edge compared to their peers.

The SUPERIORITY EP has a certain victory-lap kind of feel to it in that regard. WAGAMAMARAKIA was the hey-look-at-us, and now here’s the follow-up, five more songs from guest writers that have this much more “street”* feel to them, doubling down on rapping and rocking and idoling all in equal measure — it seems like half of all new units anymore try to work in some raps no matter how incongruous, and while Wagamama may not have been the first, they did seem to emerge as the best practitioners.

The MV for the record’s lead, “JOKER”, hit this morning, and … yeah, really, you just have to experience it: Continue reading →

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I Don’t Always Listen to Live Idol Albums, But When I Do, I Prefer PassCode’s

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This post is entirely about doing three things:

  1. Posting about PassCode, which we don’t get to do enough
  2. Enjoying a PassCode album, as we haven’t had a new one in a while
  3. Spreading the gospel and hooking in some people who maybe aren’t as familiar

Anyway, let the title describe it for you. I almost always pass on live records from big idol gigs, the exception to date being the OG Red Night/Black Night Babymetal recordings. There’s just only so much time and unfathomable amounts of music to fill it with, and I may love idol but I also love a lot of other things; if I wanted to listen to off-quality recordings of people who for the most part aren’t particularly good singers in the first place, I’d invite my friends over for DIY karaoke again. Continue reading →

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Tastes Great, Mortally Oppressive, Less Filling: New akugi MV

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The first EP from Codomomental newbies akugi, Playplay, seems to be hitting the stores in Japan as we speak, and that means that it’s time to show us why we should buy the thing, and that means an MV, and frankly it’s been too dang long since we saw akugi do their thing, so let’s just right in:

Zenkimi guest spot!

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Let’s Discover Some Idols: DEARDEVIL

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I get the feeling that this one is less a Let’s Discover and more a Let’s Mutually Agree To Play Along While Maniac Covers His Ass About New Idols, so bear with me. But if you’ve been anywhere near the wonderful devilsend that is Satanic Punish, you’ve no doubt come across a worthy sister project called DEARDEVIL, which is just such a delicious bit of wordplay that I’m mad I didn’t think of it first. But anyway!

This is DEARDEVIL (Twitter), and this is my first exposure to them: Continue reading →

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It’s an Erisu Release Party Smorgasbord!

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This post was, uh, supposed to run on Saturday, and then through some mechanical error on my part did not run on Saturday. So instead let’s do it when it’s convenient!

I love having Erisu in a permanent state of notification on my phone. Because they don’t do 20 lives per week, every announcement has some actual heft to it, and you’re goddamn right I was stoked when they started their last most recent countdown. The reward was this latest EP, continuing on their theme of alien goddesses come to earth, which is capped by:

Yep! Continue reading →

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We Should Probably Be Paying More Attention to MAD JAMIE

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I hope you all remember one of my personal favorite Let’s Discover Some Idols idols from a little while back, which context clues should immediately make you realize would be MAD JAMIE, and which then in reverse does reveal my bias for the best debut of 2020. I can own that! If you haven’t listened to their FUCK FOREVER mid-length, I do encourage you to, for it is loud and simultaneously idolly and just delightfully chaotic. But anyway, since their actual physical debut several weeks ago I’ve been somewhat quiet on MAD JAMIE just because I haven’t been paying super-close attention — this isn’t the only MV they’ve put out recently, in fact — and in doing so upon noticing that they’d dropped another video from the album felt like it was time to give ’em a little extra boost while writing tortured run-on sentences.

So:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #238

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Good morning! Who else is just so super tired right now? I was working after hours yesterday to try to clean up a few things, and I had this realization that between that extra time and things I’d done over the course of the week, I’d put in something like 55 hours. Did I promptly stop and go out for pizza and beers with my best gal? Friends, I did not. Instead, I worked for another hour!

This was such a great week for idol and this website, though. Just good material all over. I can tell these things by various metrics — sometimes it’s just a qualitative “goddamn that was good,” and other times it’s the amount of engagement that a post gets on Twitter, and sometimes it’s the sheer lunacy of complaints about the post. We really hit the trifecta this time!

Anyway, weird Weekender here, because let me reiterate: A. Great week; but B. very busy. There are at least five other things that I personally want to cover from the week that are currently in one draft form or another! But otherwise it’s a ton of video and not much else because I kept the goods for more creative purposes.

Famous Last Words

All you folks who had Italy plans last year, prepare to wait another year:

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The Case of 2& and the Mysteriously Sound-alike Song

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[Ed. note: Too many beans were spilled! This post has been updated to keep people out of hot water. Homicidols Dot Com regrets the error.]

For those of you who haven’t been hiding under a professional boulder like me, you’re probably aware of a certain alleged case of musical plagiarism that hit loudol last week. Effectively, fans of the most recently crowned Queen of the Scene and Therefore Official Oshi of Homicidols Dot Com Saki of Guso Drop and 2& fame noticed that a recently debuted unit called Kaiju by Me’s new single had a certain striking similarity to 2&’s “Machigai Darake”.

Now, I’m a generous sort. I tend to believe that people, until proven otherwise, go about their business in good faith and with good intentions. I was somewhat incredulous when I first heard of the plagiarism. This, I thought, must be one of those everybody’s-right situations: Maybe the song’s kind of a rip-off, but not consciously so, or not deliberately consciously so, like not Vanilla Ice adding a little hitch to a vintage Queen bass line and pretending like it’s something new, more that someone had a tune in their head and wound up writing it and then it turned out that there was a great reason that the tune was in their head (they used to listen to the song a lot!) and whoopsie daisy, well now the ship has sailed, let’s all move on with our lives.

Except no omg holy shit this is some of the worst plagiarism I’ve heard since Led Zeppelin. Check this out: Continue reading →

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A ZOC n’ Roll Debut Album

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A wonderful problem to have is walking in front of a luxurious buffet and not knowing which thing to eat first because it’s all so good – that’s the experience of trying to write about the new ZOC album from Seiko Oomori and her juvenile delinquent girl gang.

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