Month: January 2017

FRUITPOCHETTE’s Collaborating with a Band, Like They Should

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

I like this little bit of news: FRUITPOCHETTE, who I seriously hope can get back the great momentum that it felt like they had just a little over a year ago, are going to take their relationship with SEX MACHINEGUNS* to the next level by not just performing together, but proverbially making a baby together and hitting the road to promote it:

Continue reading →

You Can Download THE SPUNKY’s Last Song

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

As you know, THE SPUNKY are going to be wrapping things up in a few months and taking their high-energy pop punk with them. That’s sad! But from now and for a while, you can download their song “Reviving Energy” for free by following these simple instructions:

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So Let’s Talk Corenament

/ Homicidol Maniac / 11 Comments

Hello, lovely people. It’s Maniac. If you enjoy yourself some Weekender, you saw that I started talking about the Corenament for this year, not just in the context of last year’s monstrosity.

What’s the Corenmanet, you ask? Why, it’s just our way of having some fun around the same time and concept as the NCAA basketball tournament — while the young men and women of America’s highest-level collegiate basketball teams battle it out to determine a national champion for that year’s season, we pit idols (and their fans) against each other in a multi-round competition to decide who’s the best at something.

Last year, it was best song, forever, period, and Kamen Joshi took home the trophy for “SOUL,” beating out BiSH and “Hoshi ga” in the final round when Babymetal and Deathrabbits were both disqualified because some people are just rude. It was a weird competition because my own awareness of what’s out in the world was limited, and it took a minute to organize conceptually, but it kind of worked. I definitely got a kick out of a bracket that made people pick between BiSH and PassCode!

All of that to say, I’d love to do the Corenament again for 2017, and we’re only about a month out from March Madness. The trouble is, what should we organize around? Continue reading →

I Think WA-Side Is Perfect for the Tuesday WTF

/ Homicidol Maniac

I was a little uncertain about what to do for the WTF this week, gang, (and one could make the argument that it already happened), but then I remembered something that @PureIdolHeart had tweeted at me earlier, and I thought it might be worth a look. It was!


That’s very efficient headbanging

That’s WA-Side (Twitter). I’m still just kind of blinking at my screen. Continue reading →

I Hate These Kinds of Stories

/ Homicidol Maniac / 4 Comments

About a month ago, I was excited that Too Young to Fall in Love, Koiwosuruniwa Wakasugiru, was getting a fresh reboot and a chance to bring the pain with backing from real scene insiders. Now, the members are all out, and the alleged reason why isn’t pretty.

First, the statement on the group:

Basically, the re-formed Koiwaka won’t be making their stage debut because all of the members have withdrawn. The reason why isn’t pretty. Continue reading →

This KIRAKIRA GERIRA Promo Is Epic as Hell

/ Homicidol Maniac / 3 Comments

Epic. Ambitious. Maybe even a little intimidating! But KIRAKIRA GERIRA, who are cool, found a great way to make their announcements for 2017:

For an indie, this is what you call “going for it.” Good for them. Continue reading →

Finally! Osaka Shunkashuto’s MV for ‘New Me’

/ Homicidol Maniac / 12 Comments

It feels like we’ve been talking about SSFW’s latest for weeks (because we have), and finally the MV hits the real Internet:

Yeah, they released this on their app at least a week ago, and then teased out a download link on Twitter (and immediately deleted it), and I was starting to think that the video would never get a public release because idols can be cruel.

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Oh Neat, I Shared This

/ Homicidol Maniac

I’ve been trying to work out the best way to do reblogging between WordPress sites in our little network of friends, and I finally got this one to work! Lovely. So this is from Straight from Japan (hi John!), and I’d been meaning to do something with it for a few days, and now here we are. Good for us! You should also follow John, as nobody gets into the indies as hard as he does.

Neo-Tokyo themed alt idol unit uijin is releasing their first single, “001/ten-age”. It will be a venue only release starting on January 28, 2017. It will contain the tracks “001” and “ten-age”. The group just debuted on December 3 2016, so they are moving forward pretty quickly. They have also announced their first one-man which […]

via uijin Releasing First Single and More — Straight From Japan

Monday Match Game: Who’s the Lord of the Dance?

/ Homicidol Maniac / 2 Comments

Due to an ongoing conversation with Kerrie about some stuff that we can pull into the Friday Fun series, I’ve had idol performance on my mind a lot lately, and, while this is a music website first and foremost, dance is a pretty big part of the idol experience, and the idea of loudols doing choreographed, athletic routines being a perfectly normal thing is probably an important step toward normalizing idol for the normies.

So! Last week, the Monday Match Game featured a hip-hop beatdown of epic proportions, as the original Koutei Camera Girl flat-out smoked Girl Zwei and Gal by a cumulative 2:1 margin, thereby earning the right to face off against Drei after they debut and get out some material. Good times!

That was a question of beats; this is a question of steps. And twirls. And stuff. And while there are plenty of idols who are good-enough dancers, there are those who flat-out excel at it and have the ability to move on stage and tell a physical story to the music. And among those, there are those for whom dance is the very center of their game.

This week’s participants aren’t just at the top of the world of idol dance; they have something very important in common, too. Yes, friends, this week’s Match Game pits dance-unit-turned-idol against dance-unit-turned-idol. In the red corner, hailing from Osaka and led by the soulfullest voice in idol, a former high school dance unit that added vocals and never looked back; in the blue corner, from some posh boutique that we aren’t cool enough to enter, a former pro dance unit that added vocals, immediately became a thing and is about to make their major debut.

Similar backgrounds, similar timelines and a whole mess of muscle control. When the lords of idol dance enter, only one will survive! Continue reading →

New Sickness: Yamitsuki Company, Please and Thanks

/ Homicidol Maniac / 6 Comments

There have been more than a few instances of arm-waving and MANIAC WHY AREN’T YOU LOSING YOUR MIND OVER THIS when it comes to Yamitsuki Company over the past month or so (including in the Weekender!), and you’ll see and hear why in a second, but I want to preface this by saying that not a single person who’s brought this up, all flush-faced and panting and sort of vacant-eyed, had anything but total commitment in how they talked about it.

So. “Sickness.” Ready? Continue reading →