It’s a Nonamera world, we’re just living in it.

“That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood

I got news for you, SHE IS”

Have you seen these lyrics from Bikini Kill’s Rebel girl? Clearly, Kathleen Hanna was prescient and wrote this song before the girl that would become Nonamera was even a concept in either of her parents’ mind. I’m kidding, of course, please don’t send me hate mail. This apparte and Bikini Kill have little to do with the musicality of Nonamera’s first solo release, and yet they are absolutely applicable to the blonde pixie.

The background is a deep lavender gradient becoming a teal blue, with magenta pink in the middle. It's the album cover. The visual is Nonamera's head, with an abstract photomontage coming out of the top of her head, as well as a separation just under her nose, with water coming out of it. The title "My Name is..." is written in caps and the font style is ballons-like, with a chrome/metallic impression.

Since said mini-album was just released, why don’t you hop in to read what we think of it?

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I Enjoy This Particular BiSH Song Template

So as I was saying before, I had pretty high hopes for this BiSH album (out now!), and they graced us this morning with another MV from it, which:

I am supposed to be working right now, so this is also very short, so let’s suffice it to say that while the opening worried me that we had another “Orchestra” clone, “BE READY” here is more reminiscent of stuff from the FAKE METAL JACKET era, which for my money was actually the superior point in BiSH anthems, though now it’s both grown up and does include some tropes familiar to anybody who likes WACK artists or even just SCRAMBLES products.

I get to listen to the album today and remain pretty stoked about it.

Yuna :*(

Got to wake up to very bad news this morning. I’ll thank Papermaiden for messaging it without trying to soften the blow: “Yuna out of PassCode.”

It’s been a few years since Yuna first went on hiatus due to an ovarian cyst, and the way her and management’s statement reads, the pressure of performing eventually just got to be too much. You know she was taking a break from the STRIVE tour over the last several weeks — a break that in retrospect feels more like “take a few weeks off and think about it” than “get your rest” — so I can’t blame her for not feeling like coming back was the way to go. Continue reading

Here’s NELN’s Entry for Song of the Summer

I’ve been on the lookout for good summertime best-of candidates around the idolverse the past few weeks — our pal N.FENI sort of stole a lot of that thunder though — and frankly coming up kind of short. Am I crazy? I feel like it was normal in the past for even the alt/chika scene to get a few good candidates (even if they were piss-takes) into the mix, and this year just not so much. Pandemic? Olympics? Everybody forgot how calendars work?

Anyway, not a whole lot has happened this week, but our well-loved pals in NELN did drop an album the other day (stuff we know, though), and along with it a new single that … no, screw it, I already ruined the pun.

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I’ve Now Seen Enough to Know That I’m Looking Forward to the New BiSH Album

I think I figured out a pattern when it comes to BiSH in their “officially a big deal” era — the more seriously a release is treated by the group, the higher the likelihood that it might actually be kind of butt. Take for example Letters from last year. Yes, it did very literally top the charts; on the other hand, the only sentiment I got from fans in this particular circle was that the record was a disappointment. A win for WACK and Avex for sure, maybe less so for us. But when the announcement about GOiNG TO DESTRUCTiON landed a few weeks ago, I got a truly giddy feeling: Here was the BiSH that I love most, on the one hand playing into their old chaos merchants persona while also taking the same to a ridiculous level as a send-up of the self-serious approaches they’ve more recently taken to some of their bigger releases:

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I Don’t Always Listen to Live Idol Albums, But When I Do, I Prefer PassCode’s

This post is entirely about doing three things:

  1. Posting about PassCode, which we don’t get to do enough
  2. Enjoying a PassCode album, as we haven’t had a new one in a while
  3. Spreading the gospel and hooking in some people who maybe aren’t as familiar

Anyway, let the title describe it for you. I almost always pass on live records from big idol gigs, the exception to date being the OG Red Night/Black Night Babymetal recordings. There’s just only so much time and unfathomable amounts of music to fill it with, and I may love idol but I also love a lot of other things; if I wanted to listen to off-quality recordings of people who for the most part aren’t particularly good singers in the first place, I’d invite my friends over for DIY karaoke again. Continue reading

Malcolm Mask McLaren Matriculate Maudlin Moods

Ah, as previously noted, everything’s coming up Malcolm Mask McLaren these days, and now a month on from announcing this summer’s new record from them, the group dropped the MV from what I really hope is the trendsetter for the thing, because this was worth waiting for:

What a payoff! MMM and their melodic hardcore thing have always been such a neat package, and filing down the edges for a slightly more radio-friendly product has done nothing to take away from the group’s core merits, which in no particular order are “cool music that people of a certain age enjoy either literally or ironically” and “an effervescent joy that very few loudol acts can approximate, let alone duplicate.” Given the connotations, “maudlin” maybe isn’t the best word, but you try finding M words in English that correspond to net-positive emotional stuff. These highly attenuated post-titling conceits aren’t writing themselves! Continue reading

ANAL SEX PENiS Gets Graphic

All right, I’ll admit to having been a skeptic about the latest WACK unit to emerge. ANAL SEX PENiS, or ASP as I prefer to call them because I’m not some prurience-obsessed teenager and I have to worry about how and where my website’s going to show up in various people’s Google results, really did feel like a stupid gimmick at first. Yes, we were willingly falling for an obvious ruse, as usual playing along with one Watanabe J. for the sake of getting to the bottom of whichever kind-of-inexplicable-but-no-doubt-lucrative-and-enviable game he was playing this time around, but the thing about falling for even obvious ruses is that you still went there and in the interests of intellectual honesty you have to admit to yourself that you did, in fact, let yourself believe if only for the briefest of moments, like a kid old enough to know better unironically hating the heel. I mean, read this. The line between truth and kayfabe is always clearly there somewhere, but whether you find it in the place where it really is as opposed to where you assume it to be, therein lies the trouble.

But anyway! As ASP emerged as a bona fide actual, regular-ol’ idol unit (name notwithstanding), it also became clear that they had the musical chops. And of course they did — WACK can be and usually is a lot of things, but musically not-good is not one of them. Yes there’s a template, and no we don’t call it Kentacore because it’s so wildly diverse, but good and enjoyable and undeniably punk-inspired if not outright so are all true things to say about the product, and those are perfectly fine bars to set, and then we can leave up to you the question of whether you like and want to listen to ANAL SEX PENiS.

Anyway! ASP’s first album is arriving, and they’ve been trickling out ever more music on Soundcloud as is the wont of new WACK units, and then yesterday they dropped their first MV, which is pretty much also the clearest multisensory view we’ve had of them yet: Continue reading

In Keeping with a Theme, I’m Giving You Happiness on Wednesday

Of course within minutes of my having dusted off my hands from the earlier post and congratulating myself on a job well done to toss off some doldrums and do the the kind of post that used to foul up the ol’ Homicidols feed back in the day, Zenbu Kimi no Sei Da is out here with a promo for their other new album of re-re-recordings (“standards,” we used to call ’em), and while it’s quite familiar to many of us I don’t know if it’s all that familiar to many more of us, not anymore, and it’s such a bright and shiny and joyful little romp that, hell, just watch the damn thing and be happy and then go buy Zenkimi’s album:

Look at MANACLE Out Here Playing for Keeps

I remember coming back from hiatus last summer and getting run through the various goings-on in idol over those several months out. Graduations? So many! Debuts? Some good ones! Almost the entire membership of an iconic chika unit graduating en masse, reuniting with an old friend and starting something completely new? True as can be!

So yeah, following MANACLE from what you might call a curious distance for the last little while has been an interesting experience. Once I heard that the tea spilled over Okaki et al’s exodus was pretty tepid, I settled myself into a “this is fine” kind of scenario, like not really caring how or why but just accepting the reality of it all and hoping for the best overall. NECRONOMIDOL has obviously had some challenges; MANACLE, despite the circumstances, is plugging along and building momentum, and the release of their first album is occasion for a real-deal MV to show off what they can do:

That’s some quality work right there. You don’t hear quite so much of this take on idorock so much anymore, like it’s on the heavier end without being heavy-heavy, and it’s synthy enough that you might mentally file it under some kind of -wave designation, and it’s got a great hook that practically makes you give up and call it a pop song. Give me more of it, preferably via IV. Continue reading