This post was supposed to happen on Saturday but Maniac forgot to finish the intro and then suddenly it was Wednesday!

I like that there’s just plain a lot more idol content in the past few weeks than there had been since, lort, February? Highs and lows here and there aside, idol’s mostly been on a slow burn since COVID and all of that. Or, for idol that is; other industries are like, oh you guys just kind of adjusted and moved on? But yes, more new stuff, and including new new stuff from old friends that first excites and then contents. Ah, you say, that hit the spot.

And so it was when one of Western fandom’s ubiquitous favorites, Melon Batake a go go, dropped a neat new number with a new MV (edit: the other day). It was good just to know that it existed, you know? And as I let it play, I had a few different thoughts — It’s been a long time! I don’t recognize like half of these members! — and I realized that for as much as I wanted to have something cogent and/or decent to write about the piece, I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

I gave it some replays, typed out various responses, and then thought: A-ha! Let’s get extra input from Team! And that was helpful.

Here it is: For as much angst as I’ve expressed in Melon’s direction for being both impossibly fun and endlessly repetitive, this tune flips the script. Hell, the MV flips it too — this is additionally sophisticated work, from the writing to the production to the fidelity of the video images. It’s still classically, in every way, a Melon Batake a go go cut, but we can’t ignore the little extra polish that’s on here now, regardless of whether it’s from GOLLIPOP or Soze or whatever. And that’s all well and good, but would you be mad at me for feeling completely unimpressed by it? Be mad! It’s fine!

When your core sound is psychobilly, it’s hard enough (here I paraphrase Brian) to do a whole lot with that because that’s just how the style works. They pull it off here, though, and in a really interesting way — it’s the verses, not the hook, that show that fresher additions. And the chorus (with that hook) is a complete deviation, though in this case it’s such an aggressive shift that it doesn’t land with the impact that it should. The end result is a fine song, but not so much a great one.

At the end of the day, it’s still Melon, though, and goddamn is it good to see and hear them in action again. One of idol’s most genuinely self-created (and self-creative) projects needs endless exposure for the pure sake of getting more people to like them and buy their stuff, and that isn’t achieved by not releasing anything for like a year.