soundcloud

Catching Up: Here Are a Couple of New Ones from IVOLVE

/ Homicidol Maniac / Leave a comment

All right, let’s get the first couple of these suckers out of the way. I pre-warn you — I’m not even going to pretend to be contributing meaningful thoughts to any of these posts, just quick observations; the important thing is the music.

So, IVOLVE! It’s been a while, and probably for a good reason, as they were also hewing closer to normal idol fare even in their more interesting options, but they’re part of idol’s enduring it’s-actually-like-half-a-degree-of-separation legacy, and I have a legit soft spot for them. There are two new tracks from them in my Soundcloud feed, and this first one had me thinking Weekender —

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Your Homicidols Weekender #148

/ Homicidol Maniac / Leave a comment

Good morning! As I was putting together this Weekender, the fact that I had a few days off (and I mean, like, completely out of contact) really hit home. A hell of a lot happened! And yeah, I get to use this space to make up some of that, but I’m also going to drop a whole butt-ton of posts to compensate. I’ve been a lousy Maniac lately, and I feel like I should rectify a little bit.

Also reconnect. That’s important too.

Anyway, we’ve another great Fun to play, and look, it’s the last weekend of Official Summer, so do get the heck outside. I have a date with a winery!

You Say These Things Like We Care

In case you missed NECRONOMIDOL’s interview in the Hammer:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #147

/ Homicidol Maniac / Leave a comment

Hey gang! I hope you’re all safe — some absolute tragedies unfolded this past week, like big gigantic ones that rate the everyday sort of tragedies that a lot of us nonetheless deal with. It can be tough to think about much else when all hell is breaking loose for others, and that’s a perfectly normal way to react. I’m personally in a weird in-between spot, as often happens in the face of disaster; it’s just that I usually mask it better. But yeah, this has been a tough one.

So not the best Weekender, but maybe things like idol, and the collective good cheer of people who are into idol, can help to give folks something to enjoy. The Fun is a great example — look at this shit — as is most of what’s to follow, and of course being part of this wild scene that we all enjoy. I’m taking a few days off (pre-planned, not another sudden disappearance), so I’ll catch you all in a few!

Seriously, What the Hell Are You Doing?

We fanned on the most recent GANG PARADE video, and you know, that’s okay:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #142

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

Good morning! I hope everybody had a good week. It’s TIF week, after all, and though idol kind of pauses for a second and takes a deep breath before the festival kicks off, there’s obviously, you know, the festival to get into, so the somewhat shorter bill of fare than we might prefer is forgivable.

I’ll be honest with you, though: TIF had been for literal years my favorite thing about idol. It was so obvious that our old friend Alex even teased me about it publicly! Or maybe he pitied me, I dunno. But the point is, I looked forward to this week like kids look forward to Halloween or Christmas. But then some of the shine started to rub off last year, and, as we noted in Team chat the other day, @JAM has really become the better event. TIF still has cache, obviously, and tons of symbolic value, it’s just that the shine has worn off some.

And then things like this remind you that this is a scene replete with some of the worst people imaginable, and then rumors of other unsavory behavior swirl around the live event itself, and you start to really lose enthusiasm even before the cracks show in the organizers’ ability to actually organize. When your schedule gets as jam-packed as mine does from time to time (mine went from “oh cool, time to blog some posts!” to “please, no, not another phone call” with a quickness), and when oshis drop left and right and, as Krv noted in a conversation the other day, loud idol is starting to have some real problems with saturation and sameness — the point is, it’s a tough feeling when the thing you love starts to be kind of hard to love.

I don’t mean to be a downer. By all means, go TIF it up (and play the Fun!). Bootleg what you can, find the stream rips and whatnot after, and enjoy probably the most self-indulgent few days that idol even ever could put together. I’m taking a few well-deserved days off from working for the weekend to actually, for once, weekend.

They Don’t Call It the Heat Garage for Nothing

Agreed:

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Surviving Monday with CROSSNOESIS

/ Homicidol Maniac

Just like with their new sisters in HAMIDASYSTEM the other day, HAMIDASYSTEM refugees CROSSNOESIS put out some fresh material last week, and I may be a jerk for kind of letting it molder at the back of the queue for several days, but I had my reasons*. And now I have every reason to finally post the thing and at the very least make a permanent record of it. And maybe give your Monday morning a little bit of a pick-me-up!

This playlist that they added on Soundcloud may just be all demo versions, but it’ll sound both familiar and innovative on top of that at the same time, and that’s cool:

I may not totally get the move to pull HAMIDASYSTEM into a new thing and have the old members do a new thing with a sound somewhere between old and new, but as long as the end product has me nodding with benign pleasure (like this), I’m going to be okay. Both projects feel like winners. And if they want to get back into the media-spanning cross-functional projects that made last year such a cool follow, I’m here for it.

*They are bad reasons

The Weekly BiS Is Familiar and Still Fresh

/ Homicidol Maniac

All right, folks, BiS3 can’t possibly have revealed even more free new tracks from their upcoming re-re-debut album to preview and download, can they? That would be wild. They’d be practically giving the whole thing away for free at this point! What kind of wild-ass madman does that?

Oh, right.

Oh, and yeah, they did it! Two more songs!

Let’s give these suckers a rip: Continue reading →

Your Homicidols Weekender #140

/ Homicidol Maniac

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

/ 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 →

Wonder Lander Springs Anew

/ Homicidol Maniac

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

/ Kerrie

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!