Would it be rude of me to say that Candye Syrup gets a weird automatic reaction from me? And by “automatic reaction,” I mean “how a person reacts when someone runs up to you with a weird look on their face and saying ‘Dude, smell this.'” It’s kind of a crapshoot! They’ve managed to hit material so far out of the park that Frank Thomas would be impressed, and they’ve struck out in ways that would make Mark Reynolds blush*. So imagine my initial excitement over seeing that an MV (!) for a song called “IDOL DEATH SKA !?” (!) was out and ready for me, and how that excitement was immediately followed by the same face that idols make when they reach into the Mystery Box that, at best, has a frog in it.

I am unfamiliar with the band Castaway and its guitarist, Yossy, who wrote this song, but I saw the words “melodic” and “punk” put together in such a way that the first was meant to modify the second, and it made sense even before I’d made it past the first few bars. It helps to be prepared, you know?

Oh come on, those girls don’t even know what Belphegor is

I’m sure that people love this. Me, I have no idea how to react! My first feeling was that nobody’s ever going to give Non a proper platform for how good at things Non is. Then I thought it was funny that the song has “ska” in the title and uses ska-related music for about a fifth of its runtime. Then I thought that it’s ultimately pretty acceptable for the easycore side of life, and maybe it all actually fits together pretty well when you consider that this is yume-, not yami-, kawaii, and I should stop being such a prejudiced jerk, but I had to allow that I’d smirkily tell a Westerner who wrote a song like this to be careful to not cut themselves on all that edge and nonetheless make an allowance because, again, idols and yume-kawaii. Then I just up and decided that I’m allowed to like and not things at will, and then got lost in a weird spiral of Candye Syrup and sisters’ videos until I realized that this weird not-a-year-old is Starlit Signal’s most popular project by a pretty significant margin, and Iku really figured something out.

So! If you’re down with Candye Syrup, I bet you’re a happy person; if you aren’t, I don’t think this one moves you too much. Regardless, we should all expect to see much more of one of the fastest-growing indie projects in the business.

*Pitchers and catchers report in a week!