Month: May 2021

Your Homicidols Weekender #236

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

Good morning! My goodness, a ton of things happened this week. And very little of it bad! That’s really the marker, I think. The biggest impact thing here at Maniac Mansion was literal impact — a neighbor’s ginormous tree snapped at the base of the trunk and managed to fall in the only direction it could without really destroying things, but it did manage to crush my fence. I was displeased! And these aren’t the kindly old family next door who bring me mail and chat me up in the yard, they’re the fundagelicals who only recently stopped trying to get me to go to church with them. Am I surprised that they haven’t made a move to get the dang trunk off of my fence so I can call the insurance company? I tell you, friend, I am not.

But other impacts! Like, just so much great music, idol and otherwise. We posted a lot, this is a loaded Weekender, and there’s a whole side list of things that came up in various contexts that I just don’t have a great venue to share with you. And that’s okay! The Thai shoegaze idol group that Cal found, though, that I’m sharing with you here.

Anyway, you all please do have a great weekend. It’s a holiday here in the USA so I’m going to be serious about catching up on some personal projects and otherwise shutting off my very busy brain. We all deserve a break sometimes.

Says the Guy Who Doesn’t Post Enough!

I’m far more excited about the new BiSH album than I probably should be, largely because this is an excellent promo for it:

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I Liked This POPPiNG EMO Song So Much That I Needed to Make an Inane Post about It

/ Homicidol Maniac

Color me very impressed by the raw amount of good stuff this week, and how much we covered it. It had been a while! Heck, when was the last time I managed three in a day? That goes back a good while, it does. So in the interests of keeping the momentum going and because I did kind of promise myself that I’d do it anyway and because I mean what I say in the title, it’s a killer song and we all could use a nice boost to close the week and look ahead to what’s a three-dayer here in the USA, I present to you the latest from POPPiNG EMO, formally dropped a couple of days ago but frankly something that you may wind up sticking on playlists for a while:

Now tell me if you had basically the same listening experience, or something akin or even something wildly different. Continue reading →

SIPP Shines in Second Single, “The Same Old Sun”

/ DAEMON

A few months ago we first featured SIPP (Super iDOLS Pops Punk),  a new unit out of Osaka that sprinted from obscurity to song-of-the-year contender on the strength of their debut single, “dawn”. With an introduction that unbelievably good, we were trying not to let expectations for SIPP’s follow-up run too irrationally high. There have been any number of groups over the years that stormed in with a dynamite debut and then just faded into the ether.  Still, during this week of A-list music releases, the most highly anticipated song for many of us was the second single and MV from these rookies:

It’s time to get irrationally excited again. Continue reading →

Dream your way into the new Cinema and Boy CQ

/ Papermaiden

Cinema and Boy CQ just released their latest MV and it’s a phenomenal one.

The song is Tranquilizers no koibito (translated, as shown several times in the MV, to “The Lovers of Tranquilizers”) and the song was written by Yoko Hamasaki of Urbangarde fame.

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Nobody Knew It at the Time, But I Was Just Having a Conversation about akugi’s Latest

/ Homicidol Maniac

So just the other day, back when this was happening, I thought to myself, huh, it’s actually been a minute since we last heard from akugi at all, there must be something imminent happening there. And resultingly, because it was on my mind, bringing up akugi while talking with a friend who asked the obligatory just-heard-that-Maniac-does-a-Japanese-music-blog questions of what’s good and what should they check out and what do I personally like now and so it’s basically K-pop no you fool it’s nothing like K-pop there’s less distance between K-pop and modern American R&B than there is between either of those things and just J-pop, let alone the stuff that I write about oh hell what was I talking about? Right, see there’s this one company …

On Monday of this very week, then, with no real connection to the former, my brother messages me to start a conversation about trap metal. This revealed both our mutual passive interest in the form, our general disdain for artists X and Y, and my typing with vigor “lol there really needs to be some idol group that does trapcore or something”.

Forward to today! Thank you, Codomomental, for this morning giving us a refresher on what is for my money your most interesting new project since KAQRIYOTERROR, still with Architect in their name, found their groove several years in the past now. And thank you for this instance of breaking the Codomocore mold (songwriting credits!) inadvertently leading us directly into the path of a speeding freight train that I now fear is going to somehow be normalized into idol genre mores and suddenly it’s going to be face tattoos and misappropriated street fashion and snare rolls everywhere.

Anyway, the window closed hours ago, but you know the drill:

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Malcolm Mask McLaren Matriculate Maudlin Moods

/ Homicidol Maniac

Ah, as previously noted, everything’s coming up Malcolm Mask McLaren these days, and now a month on from announcing this summer’s new record from them, the group dropped the MV from what I really hope is the trendsetter for the thing, because this was worth waiting for:

What a payoff! MMM and their melodic hardcore thing have always been such a neat package, and filing down the edges for a slightly more radio-friendly product has done nothing to take away from the group’s core merits, which in no particular order are “cool music that people of a certain age enjoy either literally or ironically” and “an effervescent joy that very few loudol acts can approximate, let alone duplicate.” Given the connotations, “maudlin” maybe isn’t the best word, but you try finding M words in English that correspond to net-positive emotional stuff. These highly attenuated post-titling conceits aren’t writing themselves! Continue reading →

BiS’s Better Half Has Landed

/ Homicidol Maniac

Hot damn.

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Crossnoesis Are a Ray of (Moon)Light

/ Cal

Those dreamy dark pop divas are back at it again with a new single and new music video! There’s no double crossing here, we love the new CROSSNOESIS!

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A Yellow RAY of Sunshine For You!

/ supremenothing

Spring is here and new life is emerging from the Earth (It really is!) and the days are nice and long! We’re gearing up for summer with (hopefully) significantly less Covid-ness and I for one, am longing for a new soundtrack for the humid nights I’m driving around with my windows down. What’s it gonna be? I’m sure you all have multiple things you’re anticipating, and here’s the newest hat thrown into the summer soundtrack sweepstakes…

The glorious genre-spanning etherial beings of light that we know as RAY are streaking across the heavens with a new four-song single release simply called “Yellow”! This announcement alone is a stop-the-presses level of importance as it is, but the wonderfully generous souls behind RAY have been gracious enough to give you (for a limited time) a complete listen to all four tracks! You’re now excused if you want to cut me off here and go listen immediately, after all, I’m as excited as you are and understand fully..

https://twitter.com/_RAY_world/status/1396767933804605441

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GANG PARADE Broke Up, But GTTB Are OK

/ Cal

Well now. After a year of delays it finally happened and GANG PARADE are finally just another memory for all of us. But just because it’s a memory doesn’t mean it’s gone – the new GO TO THE BEDS song from their upcoming EP BLOOD COMPACT has a melody that you might have heard LAST time…

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