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Let’s Discover Some Idols: DEARDEVIL

/ Homicidol Maniac / Leave a comment

I get the feeling that this one is less a Let’s Discover and more a Let’s Mutually Agree To Play Along While Maniac Covers His Ass About New Idols, so bear with me. But if you’ve been anywhere near the wonderful devilsend that is Satanic Punish, you’ve no doubt come across a worthy sister project called DEARDEVIL, which is just such a delicious bit of wordplay that I’m mad I didn’t think of it first. But anyway!

This is DEARDEVIL (Twitter), and this is my first exposure to them: Continue reading →

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ANAL SEX PENiS Gets Graphic

/ Homicidol Maniac

All right, I’ll admit to having been a skeptic about the latest WACK unit to emerge. ANAL SEX PENiS, or ASP as I prefer to call them because I’m not some prurience-obsessed teenager and I have to worry about how and where my website’s going to show up in various people’s Google results, really did feel like a stupid gimmick at first. Yes, we were willingly falling for an obvious ruse, as usual playing along with one Watanabe J. for the sake of getting to the bottom of whichever kind-of-inexplicable-but-no-doubt-lucrative-and-enviable game he was playing this time around, but the thing about falling for even obvious ruses is that you still went there and in the interests of intellectual honesty you have to admit to yourself that you did, in fact, let yourself believe if only for the briefest of moments, like a kid old enough to know better unironically hating the heel. I mean, read this. The line between truth and kayfabe is always clearly there somewhere, but whether you find it in the place where it really is as opposed to where you assume it to be, therein lies the trouble.

But anyway! As ASP emerged as a bona fide actual, regular-ol’ idol unit (name notwithstanding), it also became clear that they had the musical chops. And of course they did — WACK can be and usually is a lot of things, but musically not-good is not one of them. Yes there’s a template, and no we don’t call it Kentacore because it’s so wildly diverse, but good and enjoyable and undeniably punk-inspired if not outright so are all true things to say about the product, and those are perfectly fine bars to set, and then we can leave up to you the question of whether you like and want to listen to ANAL SEX PENiS.

Anyway! ASP’s first album is arriving, and they’ve been trickling out ever more music on Soundcloud as is the wont of new WACK units, and then yesterday they dropped their first MV, which is pretty much also the clearest multisensory view we’ve had of them yet: Continue reading →

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Your Homicidols Weekender #235

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! Who else has billions of insects screaming all day and night in their neighborhood? Let me tell you, folks — it’s an absolute gas. I happen to be a big fan of critters great and small, and the more unique and weird and biblical, the better. Fiancee does not share this opinion, so at least once per day I have to grab a broom and sweep nymph shells, deformed adult carcasses and living shrieking cicadas from the front door by the dozen, just so she can leave safely. It’s a hoot.

But in other news, I do have to apologize for a terribly light posting week. We’re entering one of the most horrific busy spells at work, just wall-to-wall stress on its own plus I have some hiring decisions to make and am going through a training course to (hopefully) help one of my programs take the next step, and even though I’ve done a good job of managing my hours overall, the fact is that I just haven’t had the motivation most mornings. Instead, I stare glumly at the news for a bit, check up on things that I know I’ll have to do eventually, feed myself and then lurch into the desk far earlier than I’d prefer. Boo!

So of course this actually was a pretty nice week in idol (back-loaded, fwiw), and thus my malaise is ill-timed, but let’s see how much we can catch up on in a meaningful way.

And That’s What They’re Called Weasel Words

Our old friend is changing identity and announcing a new release all in one shot:

Continue reading →

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Your Homicidols Weekender #233

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! I hope you’re all faring well, wherever you may be, getting vaccinated and enjoying the season. We had a little cool snap this week that kept the army of cicadas in the ground for a little while long, which … frankly, I’m not sure if it’s good or bad. If you’ve been through one of these megaswarms before, you kind of welcome the idea of it being over sooner rather than later. We’ll see where we stand next week!

Japan, though. And India. And all of the other places where this god-damned virus is still running rampant. I hope people are able to stay safe and healthy, even despite the challenges. I think we all got used to the stress that this pandemic forced into our lives, and that’s not good. Those of us who have a hobby, especially one that’s as inherently joy-riddled as idol, always have something to look forward to. Some folks, though, I really worry about. May we come out clean soon.

For now, let us enjoy the fact that it’s the weekend, that somehow this performance-based thing we all share keeps on trucking and we once again have a Weekender loaded with stuff. Good stuff. Fun stuff. And if you have the chance to see family like I do this weekend, that’s really good stuff. Enjoy it!

You Really Should Post More, Though

Here’s the final AYUMIKURIKAMAKI MV:

Continue reading →

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Your Homicidols Weekender #229

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! I hope you all had as … cathartic a week as I did. Busy as hell? Yes. A great deal of things accomplished? Also yes. Making big steps in personal right directions? Man, I tell you yes. Good feelings and moods abound.

And look! It’s the elbow of the year unless you’re in a polar or equatorial region, so regardless of if you’re enjoying spring (yay us!) or fall (boring people on the other side of the planet), put that energy to good work! Go hike or garden or bike or something. Hell, it’s raining here and all I want to do is go outside and run around, especially because Fiancee had to jet for a couple of days and I’m sitting here with way too much antsiness to do or be anything that approaches productivity. I just wanna fun!

So if your idea of fun includes idol at some point of some day, then you can take this Weekender and just really dig into it. I actually held some stuff out because I want to have more to talk about later! No, it wasn’t a terribly productive week, but it was good enough and frankly there are so many more significant idol lives nowadays that you’re almost tripping over good video anymore. Just watch the heck out of it!

O– Okay?

This is pretty much it for KOTO, so:

Continue reading →

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ASP Is Good Actually

/ Homicidol Maniac / 2 Comments

Well color me happily surprised to see that WACK newest bowels-of-hell creation ANAL SEX PENiS decided to follow up the post-April Fool’s reveal of members’ crania last week with some music that better fits the, um, talent. Not that we didn’t all love hearing Jun and his friends half-key their way through a promising tune, of course, just that the recording felt like letting the cat halfway out of the bag, and then the photo reveal dropped all pretense of even having a bag in the first place.

Anyway, yeah, we now know that the members of ASP are not in fact weird bondage performers but are (probably) (mostly) (emphasis on the parentheses here) “normal” idols, and probably all women at that. The visuals are fairly clear! The voices here doubly so!

I do rather enjoy this “traditional” method of WACK reveal, from the playful mystery to the rollout with the kinds of songs that WACK traditionally specializes in, other than Kentacore:

That rocks faces, it does. The second song in the set is, of course, the OG recorded with actual members’ voices: Continue reading →

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Oh Lord, ASP Has Kind of Landed

/ Homicidol Maniac

As well-documented by Cal the other day, new WACK unit ANAL SEX PENIS was pre-unveiled at the close of the company’s annual audition/boot camp/torture center. You’ll get more out of the experience by reading the post, honestly. I don’t need to re-explain it. But in the intervening time, which is to say like two whole days, the group shot past the original Twitter follower goal set by one Mr. Watanabe Junnosuke, so the goal posts were moved and have since been surpassed again, and whether that has anything to do with this first first audio sample from ASP isn’t as important as the possibility that at some point the stupid masks will come off, literally and figuratively, and we’ll know if this is another EMPiRE situation or more of a SiS.

Anyway, first song, for what it’s worth: Continue reading →

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Your Homicidols Weekender #219

/ Homicidol Maniac

OH MY GOODNESS WE MADE IT. The hell month to end all hell months (and, after a year’s worth of hell months, that’s saying something) comes to an end this weekend with … the most significant snowfall my area has seen in several years. Fantastic. Couldn’t be happier. Definitely not indicative of anything. Definitely not mad that I didn’t jump on GameStop stock on Tuesday like I was very strongly urged to, and that the whole reason I didn’t was that I was too busy with work to do it then and “I’ll get it tomorrow” didn’t happen either and at that point it was effectively too late. Cest la vie.

I hope you’re all doing well, and maybe even made some cash screwing over those whose entirely livelihood is screwing you! I also wish that this edition of the Weekender could have a closer tie-in to current events, but … no. It’s just a Weekender, hopefully a fun one for you. And if you’re getting up to a foot of snow between tomorrow and Monday like I am, well, let’s all listen to our favorite idol classics while shoveling together!

Sounds Unnecessary

Live stream of 2& Day!

Continue reading →

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Your Homicidols Weekender #208

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! How was everybody’s week? The surreality of life in contemporary America continues unabated as we swing wildly from one extreme scenario to another — lots of people dying and who knows how many dollars’ worth of destruction from a mid-November hurricane is somehow the least terrifying thing to feature in the news in several months — but I’ll be honest with you: It’s feeling good to be a Maniac lately. Lots of good stuff in idol, mostly calm in the other realms of life. Yeah, we can make it work.

So this is the official fourth anniversary edition of the Weekender, and while the product is basically the same thing as ever plus or minus an occasional feature or two, how much has Homicidols Dot Com changed in this time? I can tell you with a straight face that I remember doing the very first Weekender. It was … well, it was this weekend in November. For one reason or another, I was at the parental home of the former Mrs. Maniac. I’d started putting this website thing together about a year previously, itself after a year-plus deep dive into the weird, wild world of idol, but all of it surreptitiously — the former Mrs. Maniac and I had a troubled relationship at that point, and while I thought she’d get a kick out of Babymetal and BiS and the like, in truth she at best thought it was all weird and (considering the source) at worst probably thought she’d need to call the cops. But because marriages in their death throes tend to give one a bit more personal time, I found that dedicating to this personal labor of love was actually pretty easy. If anything, I was able to do too much, and me being me kept biting off more than I could chew. On the weekend in question, on top of trying to visit with family I’d been somewhat harried during the week and, with a new job demanding more of my time than usual, didn’t have the capacity to get to all of the stuff I wanted to get to. And so the Weekender was born. Continue reading →

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Let’s Discover Some Idols: MELiSSA

/ Homicidol Maniac

When Sari called me back to idol over the summer (true story!), I went on a little bit of a spree to find out about as much of what I’d missed as I could. And promptly did very little with it! Yeah, the return didn’t go quite as well as I’d have liked. But now here we are, the year is drawing to a close, and I’m doing my level best to Let’s Discover a bunch of idols in the waning moments of eligibility for Best Of, so as to not give anybody short shrift.

Except that in doing so I’m yet again going to Let’s Discover an act that’s been going for … what, like 18 months? Good lord. Well anyway. That group is MELiSSA (Twitter). Don’t ask me how or in which context I found them, I don’t know, I have literally 173 browser tabs open with idol things to record or write about or forget about. But it was definitely in July because I first drafted this post then! And they have lots of rock sounds! And … well, there’s no website, so there goes my usual means of learning anything meaningful. Let’s listen to some stuff! Continue reading →

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