Babymetal

For pages and posts that relate to Babymetal.

We Over-Analyze Things: BABYMETAL | “Elevator Girl”

/ DAEMON / 2 Comments

It was about time BABYMETAL paid homage to David Bowie. I mean, while Bowie crushed just about every pop genre on the planet except Heavy Metal, he was largely responsible for the early creation of Glam Rock.

  • Without Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, we have no KISS.  
  • Without KISS to influence a young Yoshiki, we have no X Japan.
  • With no X Japan, we have no BABYMETAL.

So when BABYMETAL’s new single, “Elevator Girl”, opens by directly channeling the piano riff from Bowie’s early 80s classic, “Modern Love”, the circle of life seems, in some ways, complete. In truth, the direct influence on this single is probably less Bowie’s soul and groove-flavored New Wave, and more the J-Pop fusion of acid jazz, funk and techno that coalesced around the same time period into the broad City Pop genre. City Pop has seen a lot of attention lately with interest from Vaporwave aesthetes, YouTube channels streaming curated City Pop feeds 24-7, and it’s own brief “I didn’t know [insert name here] put out a City Pop album” meme.

City Pop is also heavily influencing a number of current groups in the alternative idol world including early album-of-the-year contenders Atarashii Gakkou No Leaders, GuGu-LuLu and the fledgling OWA Yoru.

(This is a lot of words so far just to talk about a three-minute song. What we are seeing here is an unfortunate side effect when a group as musically fascinating as BABYMETAL only releases three pieces of new material in a twelve-month span. In the absence of an “Elevator Girl” MV to talk about, let’s continue the over-analysis:) Continue reading →

Babymetal: New Single, New Tour, Old Tricks

/ Homicidol Maniac / Leave a comment

It ain’t exactly new anymore, folks, but various proto-iterations of “Babymetal Does X” have been sitting in the drafts queue and just teasing our itchy trigger fingers for the past couple of days, and the whole reason that neither Daemon nor I had hit Publish yet was because we were waiting on a dang MV that still isn’t out so TO HELL WITH IT, LET’S JUST DO THE DANG BABYMETAL POST!

So if you Weekender, you saw my brief reference to the weird feeling of seeing Babymetal making kind of a triumphant return in the same week that BiS was disbanded. That is, the two very loud, expectation-subverting idol-related things that got me into this, the first two (and I believe only in toto) to be granted the Legends tag in this WordPress configuration, easily the two biggest influences on the whole basis for this website and everything it cares about coming into existence in the first place, are going their separate ways not so much like a Journey song but more like Lyft’s and Uber’s respective IPOs, if you know what I’m saying.

Anyway, Babymetal is roaring back into your life (as if they ever really left!) with, on top of that album “soon,” the first single from it released digitally a couple of days ago and frustratingly difficult to access at first, actually, but now all hunky dory!

Obviously go buy the thing (that album’s still somewhere off in the future!), but you can also listen to it right here:

Continue reading →

BABYMETAL Announce U.S. and U.K. Headline Shows, “Elevator Girl” Release Date

/ DAEMON

The Fox God has spoken!! In the past 24 hours we have received (official) word of major U.S. and U.K. shows plus the release of BABYMETAL’s first new music of 2019.

BABYMETAL will be playing their first headlining U.S. arena show at The Forum in Los Angeles this coming October. The kitsune faithful were given all of 24 hours to prepare their wallets for VIP pre-sale tickets which are available this morning at 10:00 am PDT.

If simply being present wasn’t enough of a draw for you, every online ticket purchase for the L.A. Forum appearance comes with a CD copy of BABYMETAL’s forthcoming 2019 album which still doesn’t have an exact release date. This method of driving album sales is probably something they picked up while touring with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and/or Metallica who often do they same thing. It seemed a bit tricksy to me until I remembered the twelve copies of BiSH’s PAiNT it BLACK I had to buy to get checki tickets (worth it!)

BABYMETAL have played the L.A. Forum once before over the summer of 2017 while opening for Korn and Stone Sour. While this October performance will mark their first time headlining an arena show in the United States, they have headlined an arena outside of Japan once before. That was, of course, 2016’s record-setting appearance at Wembley arena in the U.K. to launch their last album, Metal Resistance.

Speaking of the U.K., they will be getting their own show this June:

Tickets go on sale tomorrow.

BABYMETAL also officially announced the worldwide digital release of the single, “Elevator Girl” on May 10th. 

The song debuted almost exactly a year ago on the U.S. leg of their 2018 World Tour. It is an upbeat prog-rock meets groove metal tune (think Toto meets Five Finger Death Punch) with ample English in the lyrics for folks to sing along to. 

This will be the first new music from the group since the criminally underrated “Starlight” was released last October.

BABYMETAL Announces Release of New Album TBD, 2019

/ DAEMON / 1 Comment

BABYMETAL used Fox Day 2019 to launch a new era of ambiguity, announcing that they will finally release their long-awaited new album at some point this year.

In addition to the new album, BABYMETAL revealed some major upcoming shows.  Late June will mark SU-METAL and MOAMETAL’s return to Yokohama Arena for the Apocrypha of the Fox God’s first Hemingway reference:   BABYMETAL Awakens – The Sun Also Rises. Continue reading →

You Review Things: The Babymetal Graphic Novel!

/ Papermaiden / 1 Comment

Here at Homicidols, the only thing we love as much as idols is throwing people into an experience they’ve never had before and get their raw impressions. In this case, our reviewer dived into the freezing waters by himself and we just came by with towels and a warm drink to pick him up. Friday Fun resident contributor Salem Black has graciously accepted to write up a review of the Babymetal comic (Oh? My earpiece is saying it’s a graphic novel). Please enjoy his foray into an unfamiliar medium.

 

Ok, so I been asked to review the Apocrypha: The Legend of Babymetal comic, I mean graphic novel, by virtue of having ordered a copy. I must admit from the outset that I’m no reader of manga or graphic novels, so I thought I would review this coming from the perspective of a Babymetal fan who will basically buy any merch sold in the West, aside from those t-shirts they sell to coincide with the release of everything and anything, like the official t-shirt of this novel, which I didn’t buy and why I had to read it in the nude (lie).

It’s thanks to Babymetal I discovered this very website and all the wonderful groups it’s brought to my attention since. Just think, if I never spotted a 2016 article about Babymetal performing at some festival in the UK on the BBC website, I would have missed out on so much fantastic music and never got the chance to experience the spectacle of watching Babymetal in front of 50,000 fans at the Tokyo Dome and the strange anticlimactic mood that filled the dome after they failed to make their big announcement at the end of the show. Speaking of an anticlimax, lets see what this comic, I mean graphic novel, is all about! Continue reading →

The New Babymetal Single Is as Fitting a Tribute as We’ll Ever Get for Yuimetal

/ Homicidol Maniac / 3 Comments

By now, you’ve probably heard the stream of “Starlight”, Babymetal’s first release in (/checks watch) two and a half years, good lord. There’s an MV, too, which we’ll get to in a second. First, though, let’s take these things in meta-chronological order and note: Yuimetal is officially out of the group:

Hot take to follow! First that MV:

And now to go ahead and reverse that order … Continue reading →

Babymetal to Almost Certainly Soon Be Releasing New Album

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

Just kind of riffing on my dude Daemon’s post from the other day, but it’s true, and not like in the way that I got way out in front of myself and thought that this year’s international tour was a precursor to an album release (instead it was precursor to more fan tears than I thought possible!). No, this seems pretty legit. Just play along.

First this got dropped into the world:

I’m assuming that it was kind of quietly regarded because it’s a) for the graphic novel and b) was released by the publisher, not Amuse. Fine. But … hey, that’s Babymetal music, music that was theretofore unheard by we mere mortals, and there’s some heft to the whole presentation, like there’s more to it.

Par for the Babymetal course, no doubt. Par for the Babymetal fan course, though, is to relentlessly overanalyze everything within broadcast distance of potential new material, and in this case some sleuthing uncovered our likely future. Continue reading →

Your Homicidols Weekender #78 1/3, Babymetal Edition

/ Homicidol Maniac / 2 Comments

So do forgive me for beating the Babymetal drum, but the fact remains that every Su-metal exhalation is cause for recognition among Western wota of pretty much any stripes, and all that to-do from the other day has culminated in a ton of fallout, not to mention thinking and angsting and so on. I thought, rather than try to keep up with it all in real time, why not use the patented format of the Weekender to sum up the rest of Babymetal’s week?

And Here We Are

The first thing that must be acknowledged is that Koba all but doubled down on the doubters yesterday:

And was immediately clowned right the hell back. What a brutal response. Continue reading →

So Babymetal, Huh?

/ Homicidol Maniac / 2 Comments

I could not have been more explicit when I said that Amuse doesn’t care about you other than your ability to have a transactional relationship with Babymetal, but no, I was the bad guy. Or very likely the person that you agreed with, judging by the comments! I just felt like a little rueful back-patting upon finding out that MY LITERAL BABYMETAL SUB-OSHI YUIMETAL, Patron Saint of Try-hards Everywhere, did not appear at the Kansas City show last night. Let’s have a taste!

People lost their freaking minds; as a person who enjoys a good disaster just for the sake of it, I have to give credit to all parties for playing their parts perfectly. Continue reading →

I’m Mostly Curious about How Others Are Taking the New Babymetal Song

/ Homicidol Maniac / 6 Comments

Oh neat, did my kvetching actually accomplish something?* You may have been caught up in the furor earlier today when a new Babymetal song (“Distortion!”) briefly appeared on YouTube before being taken down. Not fast enough to discourage a few quick-fingered downloaders, apparently, as it was the opposite of difficult to track down over the past several hours.

At Tokyo Midnight, though, Amuse pulled the trigger and gave us the first significant new Babymetal in well over two years:

Continue reading →