Idorock

This Is a New Single from Haruno Yumu

/ Homicidol Maniac

When you’ve been at this idol game for a while, not only do you find yourself with a startling amount of otherwise useless knowledge, the amount of recall you’ve built up as a bank gets to be almost harrowing to consider. I had the privilege of talking about ye olde website and its advent a couple of weeks back with a friend who I hadn’t seen in years, for instance, and after getting through the tl;dr Homicidols Elevator Pitch, he sort of good-naturedly challenged me on just how much there would really be to talk about. I made him look through our archives on his phone while I narrated the process of discovering literally hundreds of loud-aligned idol groups over time, and following his surprise waxed nostalgic on certain acts from way back in the day, names like petit pas! and THE SPUNKY and Tsubasa Fly, names you might not recognize if you’ve only been around in the past couple of years. And then I enjoyed telling him about the long-timers that are still out there! Your You’ll Melt More! and NECRONOMIDOL and … UNDER BEASTY. And that’s when I kind of lit up, for not only do I love them all, but UB holds a very special place in my heart for having navigated their way from a truly indie origin all the way to a major label. Anybody who’s ever turned to their idiot friends and said “we should start a band!” (as I had several times with the friend mentioned here) can relate to the excitement that wells up inside in those moments — and UB lived it.

So yeah, while I did just get to post about UNDER BEASTY recently and reflect a bit on that trajectory therein, here’s another chance because Yumu just dropped her second single: Continue reading →

Candy GO!GO! Released a Single

/ Homicidol Maniac

I got to tease it in the Weekender; now we get to hear the latest from idorock uber-veterans Candy GO!GO!. Any and all commentary saved for after the:

Continue reading →

This Is Your Periodic Reminder That UNDERBEASTY Rocks

/ Homicidol Maniac

Another one that’s a couple of days old, but worth it, comes to us from UNDER BEASTY and the near-semiannual post about them and their unique spin on idol rock, and their apparent agelessness now to boot because they’re officially passing into Legacy Idol territory at this point and my girl Yua is showing absolutely no signs of slowing down. This one is not from a recent release or even their last release, but apparently one that they wanted to do a lyric video for!

Maybe it’s their roots in being one of the truest indie idol projects to ever that keeps UB so thoroughly rooted in idol as an operating principle — they embraced a previously unconventional musical style, but their whole presentation, right down to the sporadic release schedule, is eminently idol-typical, and while it clearly works for them, it makes me sad to think about how it’s ultimately a constraint (especially because they maintain that they’re VK-oriented). Like, this song is a rocker, up there with their best if you ask me, and I wish that UB had an avenue to get just a little bit bigger. But hey, what they do, they do really damn well, and they don’t seem to be in any kind of hurry to change, so what do I know? Other than that this is a much more interesting way to do a lyric video than the vast major of lyric videos, I mean.

Let Us Be Powered by 143

/ Homicidol Maniac

Holy hell, as I return to this post to put some finishing touches on it (what do you mean, there isn’t even a whole paragraph here, you say, and I give you a nice knuckle sandwich for the trouble), I have finally found the group that completely vexes my creativity. Every post has a boring-ass title! Is 143 good and fun? They are. Have they, in their 18-odd months of existence, grown and developed and become a presence? They have. Do they impress upon the casual Westerner, especially the non-weeb variety, anything that would inspire the kinds of devotion that leads to one receiving angery comments on the internet for acknowledging the fact that, no, the answer to this question is no? No. At least, not that I’ve noticed.

So maybe let’s see! This is a fun song — I wanted a whole post for it the second I heard it — and maybe some of 143’s patented emotional idorock is exactly what you need this Monday morning, regardless of whether a typhoon has unleashed nature’s wrath on you.

You want lyrics? Continue reading →

I Don’t Think I Have the Energy to Give This Osaka Shunkashuto Post a Good Title

/ Homicidol Maniac / 2 Comments

The hardest part of being a fancy idol blogger is definitely dealing with the disappointments. I’ve pointed out in the past to absolutely zero objection that, if we’re all being honest, a lot of the people covered in this space aren’t terribly talented, and the music, though it undoubtedly has appeal for someone somewhere, just isn’t all that exceptional — but those aren’t the disappointing things. What’s disappointing is when a project is cool and fresh and smart, and the idols have great individual talents that align perfectly with the concept, and it all coalesces into something really great … that then, almost always for bottom-line business decisions, get reduced to a soulless husk. That is disappointment, and it kills your want-to as a blogger.

All that being said, Osaka Shunkashuto, who once upon a time did this, have a new EP coming out next week, and they released an MV, and the song is from that FAIRY TAIL anime that most notably BiSH also contributed theme music to, and stupid me got hype about the release for a minute before I hit play and: Continue reading →

Here’s Another New One from 143

/ Homicidol Maniac

This will be one of the longest short posts I’ve ever done because it’s just plain chock full of things that I’m not going to try to overly contextualize, so: Hey, remember 143! The cool chika rock group whose name I have entirely too much fun with? They’re still out there not just doing their fun-and-often-good thing, but advancing the way that idols are meant to. It’s good to see!

A new track of theirs popped up in my Soundcloud feed the other day, and I want you all to get the same kick out of it that I did:

You want lyrics? Continue reading →

This Is What HimeKyunFruitCan Put on the EP

/ Homicidol Maniac

Sorry, my titling muscles appear to be worn out this morning

Welcome back to Monday! So if you’ll recall, HimeKyunFruitCan, the Next Generation, had a fresh EP that got me waxing all kinds of ramblingly nostalgic. Well, that officially dropped the other day, and with it came the requisite MV to promote:

From the little preview, I thought I had the track for this picked out, and boy was I wrong! And that’s okay. I’m not manager-san and therefore not in the least bit privy to what manager-san is thinking about re: the direction of the group’s latest iteration and hence its artistic choices, and I can respect that this is a different group than the one that I treasured in the past. And it’s not a huge departure from that legacy! Just idollier than I’d usually expect.

Good Gods, Honey Emperor Is Still a Thing and Getting Better

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

Let me paint a picture for you: You start a wildly successful idol website; you set the thing up to be an exploration of pretty much anything that starts with the premise of rock sounds being made by girls in matching outfits; you spend three years traversing a scene as populous and musically diverse as a top 100 list from Pitchfork; you find yourself struggling sometimes to remember all of it, including things that you really enjoyed, to say nothing of the things that you didn’t really enjoy. In fact, if you were to dig around a little bit in the godsforsaken blasted landscape that is the drafts queue in Homicidols WordPress, you’d find an unfinished funny post called “Idols That I Consistently Forget Exist, Ranked” that I may have even referenced once or twice in the past (meta!).

Not even in that draft post is where you’ll find Honey Emperor, or Emperor of Honey or however they prefer it to be styled, in the annals of Homicidols Dot Com. Note: That says way more about me than it does about them. However, as this one quite old look in on them will make abundantly clear, they certainly had their time of rising action within the scene, and I’m frankly not sure why it is or was that it stopped. The music was at worst perfectly fine. The look and concept, like, while not for me wasn’t exactly objectionable. It all just kind of faded out of the Western wota consciousness.

And then a new MV popped up yesterday!

Continue reading →

This Is the Very Full Trailer for Q’ulle’s New Album

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

I hope that everybody was looking forward to Q’ulle’s upcoming album release, their second under Avex, at least half as much as I have been. Arguably the finest purveyors of idorock left alive, the former dance troupe is always at least good and has an upper echelon that most idols, frankly, can only dream of trying to reach. Plus, unlike a lot of projects, they didn’t have to change what they were doing when they went major! They just, like, did even more.

Give this a quick spin:

That’s a lot of previewing to do! Granted, there’s enough music that you’ve heard before (because you are a Q’ulle fan, like all smart people are) that it’s not totally fresh and surprising, but there are some new moves here that I wasn’t prepared for. Yakko’s death growl, for instance.*

The thing released today, so go get it!

*May or may not have happened

I’m Avoiding Semi-precious Gem Puns for the Sake of Us All: Meet garnet.garnet

/ Homicidol Maniac

While idol’s in the throes of Halloween, the greatest time of the year to be a living alt-persona because you can put on a slightly different version of that persona and get even more money than usual, there’s not a ton going on other than idol Halloween, so we here at Homicidols.com hope to fill a void. Yes, we understand the sensations of loss and frustration that can happen when your expectations of regular new stuff go unmet, and we’re here to help.

With more new idols! Ol’ Maniac here did promise to feature more new artists this year, or at least new projects with old artists (see below!), so here you go.

Say hi to garnet.garnet (Twitter). They debuted on Sunday! What kind of unit are they? It was hard to tell when their tweets started to appear in my feed, because they hadn’t released anything yet. Now, post-debut, at least we get this much: Continue reading →