I Couldn’t Be Happier for This HimeKyunFruitCan EP

/ Homicidol Maniac

I periodically lament the amount of change that the idol scene has undergone since I first picked up it, and certainly since I started this goofy ol’ website. So many of the groups that were effective backbones are dead and gone, and even many that have managed to keep it together are very different entities than they were in the day. What’s worse is that I outright miss some of them to the point that, during duller times of the year, I get a little too nostalgic and pull that old-man-yells-at-cloud-get-off-my-lawn thing. I miss my idols, is all!

Fortunately, HimeKyunFruitCan (which I believe is now the preferred romaji nomenclature!) may have gotten a reboot, but they’re still at it, and still repping Ehime, and still releasing new things. Just learning about this new one filled me with happiness — one of my favorite old mainstay groups, or an approximation thereof, remains to remind me of the best of it all!

The original HKFC and their wide-ranging, high-quality rock songs were such a big influence on how I came to understand the capabilities and flexibility of idol as a musical medium. When I give “idorock” a little bit of crap, it’s because it’s fairly well-deserved*, though I appreciate that the assumed necessity of idol is that at least the chorus of an individual song have that all-critical hook to ground the thing in an accessible pop sensibility. True idol rock, on the other hand, can work that need into the broader melodic framework and doesn’t need to back off at any point, and nobody ever pulled off that balance as well as vintage HKFC.

This is kind of a departure, but it may be just for the sake of promotion — it’s clearly just the one track out of five, it’s a short preview, and goodness knows that the market likes getting into that heavier synth style. It pulls a little from past work out of the Mad Magazine family (looking directly at nanoCune), too.

There’s clearly an MV hidden in all of that, so we should expect to hear more, and more in full, over the next week or so. I say, as long as at least one song in there sounds half as good as this classic**, we’ll all still be in good shape.

Anyway, you’ll need this:

*I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m saying that it’s kind of lazily all the same
**I still want one of those baseball jerseys