Shingeki

I Need to Post Something and SHINGEKI Is Definitely Something

/ Homicidol Maniac

We’ll, we’re two weeks late to this party and you really do run out of things to say about SHINGEKI after a while, so this is going to be one of the least interesting posts in the long, agonizing history of Homicidols Dot Com. But hey, new MV, completely bonkers, you know the drill:

I actually unironically love it! Also unironically love this tweet for just plain putting it out there:

Remember, this group is going to Budokan.

Guess Who’s Going to Budokan

/ Homicidol Maniac

Doop-dee-doop, scrolling through Twitter, looking to connect with something interesting in idol … Hello, what’s this?

You’ve got to be kidding me. Continue reading →

Wherein One SHINGEKI MV Stands In for All SHINGEKI MVs

/ Homicidol Maniac

So the other day, doop-dee-doop and all that, I see that one of my all-time anti-favorite acts in idol had a new MV. Should I write about it? I thought. Should I see what it’s like before making a call on that? That seemed wise. But then again, the artist in question, most easily referred to in their preferred shorthand — that is, SHINGEKI — you almost always know exactly what you’re getting, the only questions being left to the finer details. And so I thought, ah, let’s just Weekender that stuff again, nobody will miss it. BUT, friends, a different kind of realization struck me. See, it’s been some time since SHINGEKI came into our lives, and there have no doubt been hundreds of you whose journey into idol started after that and potentially even after this website stopped automatically posting every dang thing they did, so:

I decided that maybe, maybe just this time, I could try to fulfill the purpose of this website and put some context to the … I actually don’t know how to describe the way I usually respond to and consider SHINGEKI stuff. It’s almost always enjoyable if you can put away particular expectations other than “expect anything”; it’s almost always “good” in the sense that whichever musical elements they’re randomly slamming together sound nice and even sometimes tie together well; nonetheless, could I be accused of disparagement when it comes to SHINGEKI, something that would rise above light, good-natured teasing perhaps all the way to outright mockery? It’s all on the table, folks. But this post isn’t to recapitulate past observances, it’s to give those of you who either don’t know this wild-ass project or have only encountered it in snips and/or my backhanded remarks a chance to experience it in all its glory and then make your own judgements.

So. New single: Continue reading →

Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me about SHINGEKI’s Awesome Thing?

/ Homicidol Maniac

Well if there just hasn’t been a ton of stuff to do and catch up on these past couple of weeks! I apologize to all idols involved for the little burst of little posts today, but I don’t want to miss a thing (/Aerosmith joke), or at least not more than I’ve already missed.

But! This piece, obviously from SHINGEKI, is a couple of weeks old now; it is, however, completely worth your time:

Sorry, this song rocks, you guys. Like ROCKS. I don’t care that it’s equal parts awesome and SHINGEKI being SHINGEKI, or even that it involves people in those goofy light-up masks that I get served ads for for some reason. And yeah, maybe I’m a believer in SENKOU SOUND now (it’s in the house tonigt!). I’m not kidding, in true SHINGEKI fashion the song makes less than zero sense, but they managed to hit every little flourish that I eat up in genres from idorock to deathcore, and I’m here wondering if we already have a leader for 2020’s song of the year.

I may also be getting away ahead of myself! But for real, I don’t even know what the occasion of this being published was, other than SHINGEKI doing SHINGEKI things, so if you happen to be a wota of theirs, by all means clue us in.

Catching Up: SHINGEKI Is Playing a Different Game From Everybody Else

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

There’s an editorial choice to be made by the owner for a fancy idol website every time an idol group worth following does a thing. That calculation used to be simple — back when life was simpler and everything idol felt fresh and exciting just by dint of existing, I’d blog a post and all 35 readers would either marvel at it with me or correct me like the heinous scene-crashing joke I was. What’s changed in the past four years is that now I have two other choices — I can also stick the item in the Weekender as a toss-off, or I can elect to ignore it because it’s impossible to gaf about every little thing, as made evident by the fact that now it’s a few orders of magnitude on from those original 35 readers and I can still expect that certain topics register, at best, a couple of dozen views.

So now, while I catch up on a very busy week when I was deliberately out of pocket, I’m already past the point of deciding if something is Weekendery, as that ship sailed yesterday. I can however still opt to just not post about whatever, on the premise that it isn’t so interesting. And that adds a fun twist to what I do hold for a full post, doesn’t it? Yes, every new post is a tacit endorsement, one way or another, of whatever the What is, but that feels amplified now. And, as a result, I feel a certain amount of responsibility. I’m saying that the subject of the post is important and notable!

Therefore I give you without reservation the latest wild-ass ride from SHINGEKI since their last most recent effort to offend the brains of boring people. Continue reading →

Man, I Kinda Missed SHINGEKI

/ Homicidol Maniac

Ah, SHINGEKI, one of my truest guilty pleasures in idol, where have you been? Probably nowhere other than the usual, which is to say doing a ton of lives and releasing plenty of wild-ass content right in line with their personal brand as the most random idol group in existence (who else remembers this whole mess?). I digress — they’ve settled into a perfect niche for themselves, possibly so perfect as to have gone quiet enough to escape my fleeting notice, and if I hadn’t mentioned them in the Weekender by chance the other day, I’d have had no real reason to want to look back and see — Hey look, an MV!

Never has there been, nor potentially could there be, an idol group so wholly committed to its own wildly unique vision of what it is, what it does and what it sounds like. And in the case of SHINGEKI, that means deliriously high-energy idolcore sprinkled through with rap breaks, narration, verses that feel like they were pulled from completely different songs, you get the idea. It’s not for everybody, and sometimes I can barely stand it (JUST COMMIT TO SOMETHING!), but it can also be wonderfully refreshing, like frozen watermelon on a summer afternoon.

I’m not sure what the occasion for this is, and that’s fine. Just keep practicing those two-steps, girl; they’re looking pretty good.

SHINGEKI MVs Are the Solution

/ Homicidol Maniac

Ah, SHINGEKI, just when I think that maybe there’s an upper limit on just how random they’re going to be in their work, they go ahead and prove me wrong. Such an interesting trip each time out, as you try to predict what steps they’ll take, where elements will be threaded together without so much as a shred of coherence … and it works. It always works.

Recent laments / celebrations as to the same aside, I did partially miss out on SHINGEKI’s release of a couple of new MVs in super-real time (a man only has so many hours), but now we can put them together and really appreciate what one of idol’s deliberately weirdest entities can put on.

From last week:

This one popped up yesterday: Continue reading →

SHINGEKI Remains One of the Most Randomly Delightful Things in Idol

/ Homicidol Maniac

Well, it’s a few days late at this point, and just a quicky little post in acknowledgement, but SHINGEKI — that is, the frequently half-dressed idol unit that doesn’t have time for your “structure” and “theme” while it rocks out — dropped another new MV this week, just as I was adjusting to their new reality, and I swear they do these things at whatever interval strikes them as interesting:


I do think that every element in this song has appeared in at least one other, so that’s kind of neat

In a lot of ways, I could have just jammed this into the Weekender, but I feel almost obligated to stand by SHINGEKI at this point. Sixteen months ago, they were this bizarre on-the-fringes group that happened to employ an old personal favorite for a hot minute and made music a bump or two heavier than most; now that we’ve taken this incredible evolutionary journey together, and that they’ve proven to be compelling even if for no greater reason than their raw unpredictability, I’m all in.

What the Heck Is Going on with SHINGEKI?

/ Homicidol Maniac / 2 Comments

I mean it, I have absolutely no idea. I’m very literally asking because I know that some of you guys follow them pretty closely, and while I happily take a professional passing interest in them, I am only one person and all it takes to go from In The Know to Confused As Hell is to miss a few tweets.

All I know is that the membership is all over the place. Graduations! Promotions? Something! It’s apparently all in here:

And they’re filming! Continue reading →

This Is SHINGEKI At Their Best

/ Homicidol Maniac

It was really annoying to not get to post about this yesterday, because of all the things that SHINGEKI has done in their year+ weird, winding journey to becoming the thing called SHINGEKI, this is arguably not only the best thing that they’ve done, but the most SHINGEKI thing that they’ve done at the same time:

For one thing, that’s the kind of wild-ass composition that only idols and the likes of Maximum the Hormone can pull off unironically. And I’m talking about way more than just the synths + beats turning what could be a metal song into a dance number — you have the random breaks, the extremely random additional spoken-word breaks, the not-quite-there commitment to English, the vocal put-ons … if you’re into the type, you’re way into this song. Continue reading →