Catching Up: So This Is Melon’s New Single

/ Homicidol Maniac

So deep was I into enjoying not doing anything last week that I didn’t even see this latest little bit from Melon Batake a go go until a little bird said on Saturday morning that I should put them on the look-up list. And oh neat, there’s a new single coming what’s now a month from today, plus other stuff!

Oh, and an MV out really early to sell it:

For one, it’s a relief (really, it is) that they broke with the usual psychobilly moves here, or at least a total reliance on them. This is a really talented group of people, full of creativity and imagination, and it was genuinely frustrating to see them continuously going down not just the same well, put pulling out the same water from that well over and over again. So on the strength of different sounds and approach alone, they’re getting plus points, and that doesn’t even touch the cool approach that they’re taking with the song. The back half and outro remind me a lot of something notable from an idol past now long since departed, though I’m struggling to place it, and either way what little I do recollect wasn’t nearly as pointed — despite the imperfect midway transition, this song overall feels like a very deliberate composition that made all of its moves to prove a point.

What point might that be? The conspiracy-minded among us might be looking at the word “final” in all of that and leaping to the kind of wild-ass conclusions that make life interesting, but no, it’s probably just a title and arguably a conceptual frame for the new single. That there’s a Zepp one-man the very next day kind of mitigates the fears. And while I think that Melon’s major deal was in part to secure the creative services of a girl named Nakamura, I also don’t think that anybody involved in the project is done exhausting its possibilities.