Month: June 2019

Your Homicidols Weekender #137

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! Man, what a week in idol. I wasn’t quite expecting it, to be honest, and it really was buoyed at the end by Babymetal’s very loud insistence on immediately becoming super-relevant again, but still. I hadn’t felt so energized in a while. It was nice!

And of course the ancillary outcome of so much going on is that we have a jam-packed Weekender, the likes of which we’ve only flirted with for the last little while. See, the way it usually works, I get little blocks of time during the day when I can look through Twitter and notice things, or one of my preset notifications looks promising, or somebody will say “hey did you see the thing” and any one of those can become a Weekender item, or maybe it’s the thing that I wanted to devote a whole post to and didn’t get a timely chance to, etc. But did I have that much more time for Twitter or anything this week? Nope! In fact, I arguably had less. It was just that much harder to miss all of the stuff going on.

So enjoy this. And then, after playing the Fun, stop looking at electronic devices and join my party for a tubing cruise down the upper reaches of the Potomac River later today, or be wishy-washy like me about going to a friend-of-a-friend’s going-away party in the evening but then still go anyway. Like, it may be just as brutally hot where you are, and oppressively, cloyingly humid, but it’s also summer, and we only get so much time like this. Do fun things!

You Make It Sound Like a Chore

Don’t you ever forget that Yanakoto Sotto Mute has absolutely no equal:

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BABYMETAL AWAKENS!! Announces 3rd Album Release Date, European Tour and More

/ DAEMON

On night one of BABYMETAL AWAKENS – The Sun Also Rises at Yokohama arena, KOBAMETAL woke up and realized he had forgotten to tell anyone when the group’s new album was being released. Shortly following Friday night’s show, he finally announced:

METAL GALAXY, BABYMETAL’s third album, will be released on October 11th 2019. This date coincides with their first-ever U.S arena show at the Forum in Los Angeles.

The 16-track album will come in at least seven flavors:

  • Limited SUN version – (2CD / Analog size jacket) – ¥ 4,500
  • Limited MOON edition – (2CD / Analog size jacket) – ¥ 4,500
  • Limited edition – (2CD + DVD) – ¥ 4,200 
  • Normal edition – (2CD) – ¥ 3,500
  • Analog version – (2Vinyl) – ¥ 5,000
  • THE ONE Limited Edition- (2CD + DVD) – ¥ 9,000 + THE ONE fan club membership
  • A transparent vinyl version has also popped up on the English language store.

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And Now Babymetal Is Officially Back

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

Now that it’s completely official, the team of moralists and ethics professors here at Homicidols Dot Com can finally talk out loud and with full candor about the second single dribbled out by Babymetal in the lead-up to their first album in three years. Yeah, we usually don’t care all that much about leaks (especially not “leaks”) in a moral sense — it’s more a “let’s see this the way it’s meant to be seen maybe” thing — but in this case it felt appropriate to hold up a minute and let the chips fall.

It’s been a weird 18 months for Babymetal fans, but as if there were any doubt after “Elevator Girl”, this latest one is as definitive and clear a statement as you’ll get that the greatest show on earth is ready to smash some skulls in as fun a way as possible:

You can do the buy/stream thing here: Continue reading →

A Friday Fun Pregnant with Potential

/ Kerrie

So, Montero’s pegnate.

As one might expect with an idol pragnancy, this has brought Zekkyou60 to a bittersweet end. And sometimes, as proven in the past, bittersweet endings can make for great Friday Fun fodder, as we cry through our memes.

This is going to be all about the pergenat lady of the hour, as we collectively celebrate Montero’s incoming fetus and predict what a party for a pregonate titan as herself would be like. Oh, and all your oshis are invited to the fake baby shower. 

Yeah, this is probably gonna enter weird territory.

This week’s hashtag is #AltIdolBabyShower. And to think, I didn’t even get the opportunity to use “pregananant” in this post.

*Alternatively you could imagine your own oshi is prefnat if you want this to get into super-weird territory.

Psst, well done last week!

https://twitter.com/tothedreamlight/status/1142050796026118144

Get Your Zekkyou Fix While You Can, For the End Is Nigh

/ Homicidol Maniac

And thus we add another project’s corpse to the pile created by this brutal year.

You probably saw the recent hubbub around Montero, the half of Screaming Sixties who did not get to perform in the UK last year (though we did chat with Kai), who announced that she was pregnant. While this was remarkable in itself — not because an idol clearly had a sex life, but because it was received mostly positively by fans of all stripes — and I was halfway to writing up a thing in relation to that, yesterday brought forth what’s probably the logical conclusion to the whole affair; Zekkyou’s putting an end to things after a one-man at the beginning of September:

Here’s Kai’s reaction: Continue reading →

Time for Another Zenkimi Re-preview, You Guys

/ Homicidol Maniac

I really appreciate how Codomomental groups telegraph their moves so well — it means that I sat here with my finger on the trigger, just waiting for what I assumed would be the next preview track from their upcoming album of remixes and re-recordings (new members and all). A couple of weeks ago, it was “World End Crisis” and wew lad was that potent; today, it’s a trip further back down Memory Lane to some of the most OG of OG Zenbu Kimi no Sei Da material, but with an update!

Two hours, but you know the drill. Continue reading →

Ray Has Landed

/ Homicidol Maniac / 2 Comments

Friends, idol has been in tumult this year. Emotional graduations, gut-wrenching disbandments, the usual shenanigans turned up to 11 … it’s been a year of as many negatives as positives, I think, and that’s really hard to do in an industry built on the idea of making people happy. For a lot of us, one of the hardest-to-take moments of the year’s first half was the disbandment of our beloved Dots, who for two-plus years had been the real standard bearer for awesome shoegaze-derived alt-rock songs and enigmatic personalities. It was a blessing, frankly, to be able to host one of the good digs into the concept. Everybody on Team, I think, loved them.

And then they were gone, but it wasn’t long before the suspected successor came along — Ray came into theoretical existence not terribly long thereafter, and while things have been quiet for them in the first couple of months, of course it stood to reason that interesting and creative things were afoot. That’s where we land today, with their effective debut:

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Withdrawn Wednesday #8

/ Kerrie

This week’s Withdrawn Wednesday was mainly me looking through the twitters of my old oshis wondering “Is there anything I missed?” so once again, hit me up if I missed any of your own ex-oshis! But for now, we have photobooks, auditions and some very cute freckles, so lets get on with it.

Your graduated oshi: Where are they now?

Stocks are up at Amuse since it was announced that the YuiBot is out of the shop and ready to resume operations!!


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No, This Is What the New BiS Will Sound Like

/ Homicidol Maniac

Man, you guys, after the feelings of middling disappointment spawned by hearing Watanabe-sama’s vocal fill-in on the first track from BiS3, I was not feeling good about this whole project’s yet-again comeback. Like, BiS was once upon a time one of the coolest and most important things in music, and while a lot of BiS1’s success can be tied to the personalities involved and the angle that they took to everything, at the heart of it was the fact that their music was that damn good, and that they had the right vocal mix to crush the hell out of it while telling a compelling story about their own personality blend. Even BiS2 had its moments in that regard, but it was, yeah in retrospect but also in real time if you opened yourself to the idea, kind of clearly a knock-off. It just didn’t have the same energy or spawn the same feelings of possibility.

With the latest reboot, one could be forgiven for going into it with diminished expectation. A copy of a copy is, after all, two full orders of magnitude lesser than the original*, and I’ll go ahead and out myself as one of those who felt like BiS was getting another run more to fulfill a contractual obligation to a record label and to sell out remaining IDOL merch inventory. Other people were apparently more than ready for BiS3, though, because the initial announcement of this track’s availability (yesterday) exceeded the download bandwidth and was all but inaccessible. Good thing for Soundcloud, then, and good thing for us — this is a winner:

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Candy GO!GO!’s New EP May Be What You’re Looking For

/ Homicidol Maniac

So okay, maybe this hasn’t been the most exciting idol summer so far, but what if I told you that one of the most absolutely stalwart of projects — I’m talking duration, member stamina, growth and onward — just put out a new record that could hit all the right notes for you this summer, because it’s the purest encapsulation of idorock, the Music Genre Made for Summer? Would you be all, Maniac, please, my wets tell me what this is that I might enjoy it!(?)

You should be, but perhaps you will not, for I speak of Candy GO!GO! (obviously), and for some reason I’ve never been able to get other Western fans to enjoy them as much as I do. Maybe it’s boo me for effort, I dunno. But! They recently dropped an EP to follow up on last year’s “Fake News” single, and, frankly, everything that I’ve heard so far from IDOROCK-beyond- has made me a believer. Here’s “Dahlia”:

This one’s I guess the other side of the coin: Continue reading →