So I’m drifting through idol media these days like a half-aware drunk, and let me tell you, friends, it’s a weird feeling. I won’t tell on myself so much as to name names here, but I’ll admit to seeing a particular group’s photo, and seeing their name, and being like, wait, I know what that is, wtf is that though? And then I looked and I’d written like 10 posts about them. Never do a hiatus, I guess is the rule here.

Anyway, lots of new/ish groups out there, and I figure that I always used to at least try to cover them, so why stop now, and also hey neat there’s also stuff that’s almost a year old that I never got to before! THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS.

Which brings me to INUWASI (Twitter), who I got to by slipping and falling off of a NEMURIORCA tweet and seeing a completely different idol set when I came to. But yes, they’re also part of the Maple.Inc family, and so have more than passing similarities to MAPLEZ and etc., and oh no they debuted in like February. Oh that’s awful. Cheese and rice, can you imagine? You’re up there idoling your ass off and there’s like only 10% of the usual sweaty wota dancing in surgical masks as there’d usually be? Terrible. And then everything gets canceled or moved online? Woof.

At the time of my discovery, not-ol’ INUWASI had a couple of live clips to enjoy. I use the verb conditionally, as “different strokes for different folks” for sure applies here. Let’s start with the better of the two:

And then:

So where you fall on liking this is definitely influenced by a couple of important points:

• Is there a live audience there that’s just completely dead, or are they like mannequins or something?
• Given the choice to play with the mix so the track doesn’t sound like off-key teenagers mostly staying on the rhythm in a large, empty room with the only microphone in fact way too close to the upturned buckets being used as drums, producer-san clearly felt that making changes would mess with the fidelity of the project, or something

And of course we could talk until we’re blue in the face about the not-good harsh vocal (piped in?) and the stage that’s rather poorly suited for this particular performance, at least, and question whether anyone involves quite knows what it is that they’re trying to achieve, but then we also have to talk about Maple.Inc and its track record, and wonder if some of this isn’t being done deliberately because, like, the group is still fresh as a daisy and has probably had all of two actual human-attended live events ever.

Anyway, I think the best lesson here is to never debut during a pandemic, and then if that happens you should get a completely free re-start within 60 days of society having the all-clear. If *waves toward preceding video* is intended, though, well.