The most important thing Halloween-related is to respond to Kerrie’s call for spooky idol video. Get to it!

We’re just a week away from the Halloween specials running around these parts, and things are starting to get a little spooky in these parts. Idols of the dead, twisted clown idols, demon idols, occult idols, idols who are zombies and vampires and stuff, we got it all.

Speaking of the vampiric, remember when we took a spin through Yajima Mai? This cut-up video of a live set was added to YouTube the other day, and it’s about as seasonally on-point as it gets:

h/t @AshLikeSnow17

There’s a little bit of an exemplary lesson here, too: It’s accepted as a bit of a truism that idols looking to break through in the West need to be able to perform with a live band, and implicit in that is that having a band to perform with is a challenge.

There are challenges associated with that, of course; a band means more people to pay, and pay for, while going out on tour, and it means adding material logistics (shipping, insurance, etc.) more complex than performer+staff+rudimentary gear.

But! Mai isn’t really on the list for international breakthrough, and she’s not exactly on a Road to Budokan of her very own, but look — she’s performing with a band. And the lesson is, at the most base level, hiring some musicians (or a band in its own right that’ll take the gig) isn’t tremendously difficult. Folks look at the Kami Band, a group of well-established professionals hired by a huge entertainment company, and think that’s the standard, but it really isn’t.

I just think it’s interesting, and it informs the way we can think about how idols can jump to something more than pass-through tours in the West; it’s within the bounds of reason to work with a perfectly capable band at a reasonable cost, if that’s what it really takes.