I was late for the train this morning. It was my fault — I stayed some of the usual morning prep to follow up on some personal things that needed attention — but I wasn’t any happier for taking the responsibility. I was late, period, and being late for something as scheduled as a municipal rail line means missing the train, which means waiting for the next, which means tacking extra time onto being late. It’s dumb. I was dumb. I was mad.
By the time I got to the office, I had a day’s worth of email buzzing at me from the smart phone that I now rue like none other, a string of messages re: said personal things that needed attention and now needed more attention, and a good cluster of idol-related tweets that I knew I was going to have to cut through if I were to have any hope of not having my phone crash.
Somewhere around 95 percent of all idol-related tweets in my daily queue are pointless dreck. Oh good, you’re tweeting your entire schedule of single release appearances at HMV and Tower, fantastic, idgaf. Today was no different. Joy, though, often lives in that remaining 5 percent, and so it was when the bottom of the huge-ass pile of Zenbu Kimi no Sei Da messages lay the one that truly mattered. It was MV time!
Yotsu is pretty much everything now
Like, after the preview of this a little while back, I was pretty open in my effusion toward this single release. The song (which, just noticing, involves a lot of moves first used well with KTA) is very literally right at the top of Zenkimi’s prolific discography, easily in the their all-time top five. It’s not just the brutal edge that I’m talking about, either; it’s the re-employment of the kind of deranged mania that made so much of their earlier work so remarkable and, frankly, unforgettable. There are topical reasons for that, no doubt, which raises the chicken-and-egg proposition of which of the lyrics or music preceded the other, or even possibly syva and GESSHI both waking in a cold sweat at the witching hour and immediately calling the other with a song that needed writing.
It’s good, is what I’m saying, and way more effort went into putting it together than a lot of Codomocore, which I can and do love all day long but must acknowledge often comes across as the product of slamming together elements sampled from previous efforts until the entire company’s corpus is recursive to the point of infinity. Here you go riffing on key concepts, employing a few tropes to stay on brand but also gleefully choking out expectations in a filthy closet.
And that’s without even saying anything about the MV! Zenkimi never has bad videos — Codomomental being what it is kind of precludes that — but they’ve run a very wide gamut in terms of real visual interest in their past, a point that I’ve made before but usually in lamenting that nobody’s been injured, killed, betrayed, eaten, etc. in the latest work. All is well here! Lots of idols dancing in front of a band, yes. Also the chains, the psychoses, the outfits and makeup, the lighting, the editing … Please pay director-san to do this all the time, please and thanks.
And now I really need to get the other A-side into my life! Please give it video life!
