Month: January 2019

Endurance Pays off in the New BILLIE IDLE MV

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

I hate to over-use the phrase “damning with faint praise,” but you guys aren’t, like, following me around at Day Job and nor are you reading my project notes and the like, right? So you’re unfamiliar with my tendency to use it as, at this point, almost a double-backhand of light disregard and shortened respect for something. “At least it’s one of the best-looking proposals I’ve seen in a while” came out of my mouth on Monday, in fact, in the direction of a very-pretty-but-hilariously-over-budget-and-clearly-boilerplate-and-typo-riddled response to an RFP that will get no response in turn because it was, in fact, a bad proposal. So it goes.

And so, in a way, it goes with the new one from BILLIE IDLE, which … well, get the tale after the jump, and in the meantime maybe just give yourself a few minutes to recapitulate your BILLIE IDLE experience to date, and also pay attention to the details, because those are what sell the whole thing and make this trip worthwhile:

Stay til the end!

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NaNoMoRaL Grace Us With an MV, a New Song, & Lots of Feeling…

/ supremenothing

The power duo NaNoMoRaL have been charming us with some really terrific music since last year, with their debut EP “Nisan ka Tanso” being one of my personal favorite releases of 2018. When you combine Amamiya Miku‘s raw, emotional vocals, and terrific stage presence with Kajiwara Paseli‘s tech wizardry and secondary vocals, you have a group that’s proven themselves to be a unit worth watching.

I feel like 2019 could be a highly eventful year for these two, so it’s welcome news to see their first true “MV” finally released, and it’s for a new song at that!

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Rock Your Socks off with Under Beasty

/ Homicidol Maniac

Wednesdays sucks and existence is pain. Ergo, you should take my word for it that the arrival of the MV for Under Beasty’s new (and first major) single is what you need to emerge from a funk borne of seasonal blahs and bad news. It’s like an injection of better:

There are times when I’m in a mood for true idorock, friends, and this is one of those times. It’s true, as the sages say, that every idorock song emanates from the One True Idorock (origin uncertain, possibly recorded by Kamen Rider Girls at the beginning of Idol Time) and, in the space between realms that transcends time, converges again with every other idorock song to create the One True Idorock. That familiarity, that safety, that goofy feeling of elaborately costumed young women song-and-dancing through a sonic blitz and making it sound pretty … love.

This Is Your Timely Reminder That BOSS Is Boss

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

You may have seen, friends, that longstanding idol of terror Rei, aka BOSS, formerly of Guso Drop and now running BURST GIRL through her iron will, has a new project of the likes that really only she would have. I thought, this is a Weekender item and didn’t want to take it too seriously, but then I remembered how I’d have felt about this a couple of years ago and realized that, heck, this is the kind of thing that I’d have had kittens over not all that long ago, so let’s make a big-ass deal out of it!

Knuckle Chihuahua! Or “Chiwawa” as they apparently would like for it to be spelled.* I don’t know what that is. Like, a fighting tiny nigh-hairless dog that fits in a purse? Sounds about right. And of Boss will be providing vocals as only a person who sounds like a chain-smoking trucker but hasn’t ever actually been a chain-smoking trucker can do. Rei is literally the best. I hope they start off doing more-or-less accessible punk songs and then devolve into some spectacular grind thing. Continue reading →

Maybe You Guys Have a Particularly Strong Reaction to the New EMPIRE Song?

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

Speculative nature of the post aside, I’d completely lost track of anything that was afoot with EMPIRE, such as a single that is also a theme song, which is what this is. Bully for EMPIRE in that case. However, having now listened to it twice and observed its well-composed-but-ultimately-unexciting MV, I find that I have a desire to blog a post about it without having any feeling more intense than “oh, I should blog a post about it” about it. So here it is!

Well gee, that’s as straight-ahead a power pop anthem as you’re likely to find anywhere, isn’t it? Did Kenta write it? It’s packed with Kenta moves, is why I ask. It’s basically “Promise the Star”. Did Aina do the choreography? Those overhead circular movements are an EMPIRE staple going back to when Aina choreographed them. Will this probably sell quite a bit? Probably, or Kentacore would have all but disappeared at this stage in history.

This has been my reaction to the new EMPIRE song.

Kaqriyo Terror Architect and the Exit of Nonamera

/ DAEMON / 1 Comment

Building over from the weekend, the hottest concern in alt-idol these last few days has been the location, state and status of Kaqriyo Terror Architect’s Nonamera.  In the lead up to KTA’s in-store appearances to promote their latest single, “The Forbidden Masturbating“, Codomomental let it be known over the weekend that they had not been able to contact Nona since noon last Tuesday.

After a few days of reasoned, rational and well-informed reactions to this news and no rampant speculation at all, it was announced last night that contact with Nonamera had been re-established and that she had decided to withdraw from the group.

Hey Kerrie! Papermaiden says you can have your curse back.

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Loudly Catching up with Party Rockets GT

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

I’m bad at following things that I like sometimes. This is admitted freely. There’s a lot of stuff! And in idol, a lot of what helps to separate things or make them stand out is whether I get a notification from YouTube as opposed to just about anything else, because YouTube means video, and I always brake for video.

Anyway, in this case, said notification spun me back around on Party Rockets GT from a month ago, when they capped their year-ending one-man with a nice set of announcements:

The really important stuff for us: A new single in June, and three consecutive months of new song releases beginning in January. Which, hey, here we are! Continue reading →

When That wyenra MV Starts Your Morning Off Right

/ Homicidol Maniac

Oh dang, stop the presses, for we have a hot new wyenra MV to enjoy!

Doing this idol thing as a first step in the morning is tough sometimes. Waking up to various notifications is a mixed bag at best, and whether I’m able to process right away or get my writin’ fingers limbered up in time to do something meaningful before the long-ass commute to Day Job is a dicey proposition of its own anymore. Some things, though, are easy to fall into, and my personal breakthrough candidate for 2019 just so happens to be one of them. When folks tweet about wyenra stuff, I’m immediately paying attention.

And so! New MV. It took me a second to figure out what I was listening to, this coming as it does not from an upcoming release, but from their first single, which was released more than a month ago now but that’s okay, Codomomental releases videos on a schedule best described as When We Feel Like It and that seems to work, and plus, imagine being self-produced and managing a whole professional-level operation. That’s the accomplishment here.

Actually, imagine being self-produced and finding the resources to do this, period: Continue reading →

Your Homicidols Weekender #115

/ Homicidol Maniac / 2 Comments

Happy Saturday! Did everybody have a less traumatic week than the last few? I hope so. I had a typical one, one that began with an agenda and ended in a frenzied spree of updates, requests and IOUs to buy time to do the things that I planned to do and didn’t. Never work in this town!

It was a good week for digging into idol, though. We got fresh stuff from old favorites, connected with potential new ones, got some relieving updates about things that seemed doomed, saw new members … it was like the month of March, but all at once. Of course there wasn’t anywhere near enough time to post about half of it, but that’s why Baby Jesus invented the Weekender.

I hope you guys get a kick out of it, and that you can help us continue to celebrate #YuraSmile on the occasion of Yurapico’s birthiversary. Even if not, there’s enough stuff in here to choke a horse, so have at it!

That Sounds Threatening

Who can’t relate?

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And Now an ASTROMATE MV to Bolster Your Day

/ Homicidol Maniac

I’ve lately taken to playing the Ultimate Homicidol Playlist at the gym. Part of it is that I’m lazy in ways that would offend polite society and often don’t feel like going to the trouble of downloading new music; a more germane part, though, is that I’ve lately taken to a new cardio regimen that leaves me in lots of long, lonely, otherwise quiet bouts of activity with naught by my thoughts, so I may as well put on some video, you know? And what better than that woefully outdated, in-terrible-need-of-updating collection of the most exemplary things in almost a decade of loudol?

It’s a trip down Memory Lane, ultimately, getting to reacquaint with music and videos that I, once upon a smitten time, held lovingly in my hands while forming a mental model for what loud idol should look and sound like. Gnarly guitars and slinky synths and way too much percussion and hooks big enough to catch a tuna? Feed me, Seymour!

And so, when this new one from ASTROMATE popped up this morning (thanks Andrew!), I was perfectly situated to enjoy it for its greatest strengths and bask in its perhaps-inadvertent celebration of that legacy: Continue reading →