Catching Up: I’m Heavily in Like with the New Toricago MV

/ Homicidol Maniac

Excuse me:

EXCUSE ME:

Look, does anybody here really think that I’d deliberately miss out of one of my favorite groups?

Yes?

Come on! Toricago was part of the reason why I felt like I should try to catch up on the week as opposed to just nod at it and move on with my life. Let’s look at it together!

Why does this exist? Apparently because it can, which seems to be Toricago’s MO, and I think that shows an excellent awareness of the energy cycles in idol — if you’re going to do dozens of gigs, if not hundreds, based on the material from a single album, why spend your whole creative budget on the up front and watch your base wither over time? There’s got to be an advantage to running out there with new promotional content every couple of months, right? Shot in the arm, new fans, etc.? Etc. Hell, this one’s two years old! Clearly the decision was, Hey, it’s time for a new MV, which songs haven’t we MVed yet?

This one is more in the territory of the musical moves that I most like from Toricago, though not all the way there. At least it’s accompanied by an absolutely lovely video shoot! Like (and I point at myself while I say this) there’s a tendency to expect “good” in a music video to mean that there’s something mind-blowing or shocking or narratively coherent; the above is a great example of how you can just simply let the performers do things that ride along with the emotional pull of the song, and you add some neat visual effects and scenery and voila, magic.

And before I close this Catching Up post, I have to ask out loud if idorock, at its most basic, hasn’t dramatically improved in the past few years. Yes, Candy GO!GO! and the like are still out there doing the thing that’s been recognizable for well nigh a decade at this point, but between newer acts like Toricago and more established presences like Q’ulle, the whole let’s-blend-rock-music-with-idol-stuff movement has gone from feeling like an exploitable gimmick to an art form unto itself. Note that this says nothing about other genre/style misconventions afoot in the same space, but peculiarly just that one narrow niche that always seemed to double down on the idol tropes as soon as the general music-and-outfits elements were established as something a little off-kilter.

That’s enough for now. We are now Caught Up!