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Your Homicidols Weekender #140

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Good morning! And welcome to hell on earth! Yes, friends, it’s the time of year when the vicinity of Maniac Mansion goes from being “summery and kind of unbearable” to “blast furnace of doom,” and this has all been set up by a very long and astonishingly busy week, each day capped off by ever-increasing daytime high temperatures and the kind of violent pop-up storms that make living in this area such an adventure at times. This all made worse by idol apparently having prearranged to largely take the week off. It’s dumb!

Anyway, I lucked out and have just all of the external household chores to get through today, so do forgive me for cutting straight to the chase so that I’m not dead by noon. Go play the Fun, and revel along with me in this being on of the all-time lightest Weekenders in history!

Weak

The renewed HAMIDASYSTEM is doing the triple-threat single release schedule again:

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Here’s Another New One from 143

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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:

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Wonder Lander Springs Anew

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Ah, Wonder Lander, part of Maniac’s official Seasonal Guilty Pleasures list, a group so hard to define that I often just land on “like if college radio and VH1 had a baby before VH1 got kind of cool.” This is an awkward post about them, and not because it’s not positive (it’s entirely positive!) but because, well, I hadn’t even noticed that they weren’t active, seeing as how they were posting live photos less than two weeks ago, but I caught this out of the corner of my eye last week:

What what the heck’s going on? I don’t know, not completely, but they’re clearly now a duo, and (probably for contractual reasons) they’ve made a pretty clean break from prior regimes, even though Aya’s still with the team and possibly physically incapable of ever leaving. But that sort-of purge of the group’s up-and-down history means a whole bunch of new-sounding stuff on their Soundcloud!

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One New BiS Song, One Not-so-new BiS Song, One Maxed-out Network

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BiS gave us another round of previews from their new album that frustratingly has the same name as their first. You might have already heard “BiS3” by now, but listen to it again because now there are actual member vocals and not Watanabe’s on it!

And a brand-new song, “SURRENDER”.

Dang it, BiS. So many of us were skeptical of this third generation incoming, but these are some pretty solid tracks right here! I guess we’re stuck here forever. On that note, should you want to listen to these tracks forever (or at least until they’re on an actual album) both BiS3 and SURRENDER are free to download on Dropbox. I’d suggest grab them quick before Watanabe’s account runs out of bandwidth again!

Your Homicidols Weekender #137

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Good morning! Man, what a week in idol. I wasn’t quite expecting it, to be honest, and it really was buoyed at the end by Babymetal’s very loud insistence on immediately becoming super-relevant again, but still. I hadn’t felt so energized in a while. It was nice!

And of course the ancillary outcome of so much going on is that we have a jam-packed Weekender, the likes of which we’ve only flirted with for the last little while. See, the way it usually works, I get little blocks of time during the day when I can look through Twitter and notice things, or one of my preset notifications looks promising, or somebody will say “hey did you see the thing” and any one of those can become a Weekender item, or maybe it’s the thing that I wanted to devote a whole post to and didn’t get a timely chance to, etc. But did I have that much more time for Twitter or anything this week? Nope! In fact, I arguably had less. It was just that much harder to miss all of the stuff going on.

So enjoy this. And then, after playing the Fun, stop looking at electronic devices and join my party for a tubing cruise down the upper reaches of the Potomac River later today, or be wishy-washy like me about going to a friend-of-a-friend’s going-away party in the evening but then still go anyway. Like, it may be just as brutally hot where you are, and oppressively, cloyingly humid, but it’s also summer, and we only get so much time like this. Do fun things!

You Make It Sound Like a Chore

Don’t you ever forget that Yanakoto Sotto Mute has absolutely no equal:

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No, This Is What the New BiS Will Sound Like

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Man, you guys, after the feelings of middling disappointment spawned by hearing Watanabe-sama’s vocal fill-in on the first track from BiS3, I was not feeling good about this whole project’s yet-again comeback. Like, BiS was once upon a time one of the coolest and most important things in music, and while a lot of BiS1’s success can be tied to the personalities involved and the angle that they took to everything, at the heart of it was the fact that their music was that damn good, and that they had the right vocal mix to crush the hell out of it while telling a compelling story about their own personality blend. Even BiS2 had its moments in that regard, but it was, yeah in retrospect but also in real time if you opened yourself to the idea, kind of clearly a knock-off. It just didn’t have the same energy or spawn the same feelings of possibility.

With the latest reboot, one could be forgiven for going into it with diminished expectation. A copy of a copy is, after all, two full orders of magnitude lesser than the original*, and I’ll go ahead and out myself as one of those who felt like BiS was getting another run more to fulfill a contractual obligation to a record label and to sell out remaining IDOL merch inventory. Other people were apparently more than ready for BiS3, though, because the initial announcement of this track’s availability (yesterday) exceeded the download bandwidth and was all but inaccessible. Good thing for Soundcloud, then, and good thing for us — this is a winner:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #136

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! Ah, the first weekend of true summer. I’ll admit that it started off pretty weak for me last night. I was trying to get a table at a rooftop club to enjoy the longest evening and latest sunset of the year, only for both of the places that I’d scoped out not actually having a rooftop, and so I settled instead for a nice patio situation with a fountain and lightning bugs that really seemed to want my kebab. So it goes!

But yes, friends, it’s summertime for most of us, and the energy of the season has been trickling more and more through idol lately. Big names, little names, no-names and more are all flexing more, and more frequently, as we’re only now a little over a month out from TIF and @JAM and goodness knows what all else. Plenty of good stuff now, and more to come.

So enjoy. Idol loves Halloween and Christmas and Twin-Tails Day and Golden Week and on and on, but idol is made for summertime. Let that spirit carry you. Play the Fun. Dig in.

You Say the Same Things about a Lot of Things

First order of business! You’ve almost certainly heard the new Babymetal single by now, and you no doubt have an opinion. Cool. Daemon and I, I think, both considered posting about it, but honestly the most fun thing was just watching the hilarity unfold, and by “hilarity” I mean “people who lecture people online about Babymetal going berserk over Babymetal doing a Babymetal.” It was pretty great. But yeah, I’m sure that there’s a real MV on the way, and we can all talk about it more when the time comes.

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So This Is What BiS3 Will Sound Like, Huh?

/ Homicidol Maniac

It was inevitable following the official re-re-launch of BiS that there would be quick next steps. No, I don’t mean the greatest post in the history of idol blogging; I mean a demo of some sort, something that sticks with the WACK playbook to give a taste of what’s to come without actually revealing anything of substance — the members are all still ghosted-out, after all. And that inevitability bore fruit today! This is apparently what we can expect to hear from the re-renewed Brand-new Idol Society:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #134

/ Homicidol Maniac

Holy shit, it’s Saturday. Thank fucking CHRIST that I don’t have to go into an office today, and definitely didn’t have to do it at the ass crack of dawn, and definitely won’t be there until after happy hour ends and listen there’s no reason to ever go out in DC on a weeknight unless it’s for happy hour unless you also happen to be under the age of 24 because don’t ever let anyone fool you the only thing in DC more overrated than the food scene is the nightlife and, my goodness, did I need the benefit of a few drinks and the company of people who weren’t my co-workers this week. Good time for travel schedules to mean that I’d be the sole resident of Maniac Mansion!

Yeah, I’m gassed. I did manage to pay enough attention to do a halfway decent Weekender, if I do say so myself. It’s weird, though, not doing any posting at all for that length of time — it felt like I was leaving a part of myself aside. Fortunately, not a whole lot of particular interest was going on, so my weird feels only went so far!

Enjoy this thing, then, and do go play the Fun, and then, it being Pride Month and all, do something cool and supportive with your friends or family or scenemates — to say nothing of the many idols themselves — for whom the month exists. It’s good and fun!

Unless You Aren’t Here for Fun

I don’t know how familiar you are with MAPLEZ-affiliated project NEMURIORCA, but here’s easily the most enjoyable thing they’ve done so far:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #133

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! Good golly, what a week that was. If I’d had even the tiniest bit more time, a lot of what follows would have been standalone posts blogged out on their own, but instead ha HA we get a really solid Weekender!

Speaking of time, there’s one more thing (you can probably guess) that I want to do, and then, well, I hope you also have much better things to do with your summertime (it’s June!) Saturday than goof around online, so play the Fun (it’s very fun) and then get out and enjoy this stuff, people!

That Was Abrupt

This is how RHYMEBERRY says goodbye:

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