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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 →

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 →

Listen to the New 143

/ Homicidol Maniac

Aside from world events, this week has been particularly weird because yours truly has been finding distractions in looking back at previously-known-but-kind-of-obscure idol acts and heretofore unknown idol acts. It’s a good way to burn off energy! But yeah, as mentioned in the earlier post from today, while I do have to get on my butt and try to feature as many debutantes as possible in the next couple of weeks, I’m still drawn to those acts that I connected with once upon a time and then to one degree or another lost track of. Tomorrow’s Weekender includes a great example; 143 here is another.

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Your Homicidols Weekender #206

/ Homicidol Maniac

Happy Halloween! Oh you guys, we made it. No matter what happens on Tuesday, no matter what happens after Tuesday, we have arrived at the single greatest day of the year. We have big plans here at Maniac Mansion, so forgive me for truncating things a bit more than usual so I can get out to wrap up my remaining to-dos and settle into scaring the living bejeezus out of neighborhood children and filling myself and the future missus and assorted friends with delicious sweetness. AND lots of booze!

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I hope you also get to have a good time today/tonight. I also hope that the fact that the veil between the worlds of the living and dead is already thinning and will all but disappear come sundown doesn’t mean that you will soon be awash in spectral visitations by departed loved ones/mortal enemies, nor that we’ll have yet another incomprehensible disaster on the near horizon as literal chaos demons enter our plane to wreak still more havoc for their own amusement.

What a Day

Of all the various Halloween streams, this one feels like it would get just the right mix of elements:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #196

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! Did you all have a good week? Has the combination of heat waves and wildfires and heretofore unknown meteorological phenomena and the incredibly sad state of American politics managed to avoid dragging you down? Man I hope so. I have to admit that I’ve been feeling a little down lately myself. Call it Everything Sucks Syndrome. It’s okay to feel that way, but you have to be careful to not let it drag you further down.

I struggle with that sometimes, I do, and I know that I’m not the only person out there. I started following idol for the music almost six full years ago now, but it wasn’t until I needed it that I started to get closer to idol for the people, too. For all of the culture’s warts and unsavory-at-best worst elements, it is nonetheless filled to the brim with a relentless positivity that suffuses every surface around it, even if only an inch or so deep. The people who make these tunes and put on the weird performances we love, there’s just so much genuine try-hard energy to it, and usually so many not-so-secret absolute dorks involved, you almost can’t help but smile.

So while I hope there’s plenty for you to do and enjoy this weekend, I also hope as always that this Weekender and its collection of here-and-there pieces of idol-related good-and-badness will give you a nice little rise. I know that I always feel better after having set it up to publish!

Thanks for the Pep Talk

Our beloved weirdo YONEKO doing that dream pop thing:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #195

/ Homicidol Maniac

Happy Saturday! Congrats, friends, we did it! Another week in the can. Laurels to be rested on, ancient deities to honor, a bit of indulgence to, uh, indulge in. I’ll be honest — I personally thought I’d do a lot more writing this week, but holy smokes was I still burnt out from last week. I even took a full day off and couldn’t be bothered to so much as lift a finger. Woof.

These are the waning days of True Summer, though, and while I feel like there’s every reason to stay in the house and do some needed work, I know that the only way I’ll be able to live with myself (and avoid being beaten by Fiancee) is to, check this out, GO TO THE OUTDOOR ROLLER RINK AND THEN A PIE FESTIVAL. It’s so cute and on the nose that it makes my teeth hurt, but frankly if you aren’t approaching summertime that way, I don’t know how to convince you to try.

In the meantime, enjoy yourself some idol, and try to get in a few more proper activities-in-the-face-of-pandemic as you can. It’s going to be a rough autumn, I have a feeling.

Oh Do You Now?

Never album and tour to mark it from Toricago:

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I See That Wonder Lander Has Been Busy

/ Homicidol Maniac

I’m trying to remember my first Wonder Lander post. It very may well have been all the way back in Year 1, which is pretty wild considering the volume of disbandments among groups that were covered in that era (let’s call it the peak of Loudol 2.0, the Wonder Years), and all of the various membership ins and outs of Wonlan itself over that time. I sort of always felt that the group was destined for the same fate that ultimately befalls all idol projects … and yet, here we are, round about four years (I guess) since the first time I heard them, liked them, shared them, and a thing called Wonder Lander definitely still exists.

Different though! My very literal first thought was “oh wow, the group’s like a whole different thing now.” The most important thing of course being the music, which is, like, different! Not wholly so, mind you — Wonlan’s always been good for about 50:50 cool rock-like tunes and more conventionally idol material — but different maybe in the distribution of what they’re doing in relation to the core. You, obviously, can be the judge:

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I Just Want to Put It on Record That Satanic Punish Owns

/ Homicidol Maniac

Playing a lot of catch-up these days, friends, and doing the kind of idle Twitter browsing that used to be my calling card. It’s nice to reconnect, although going back much further than, like, a week is a fairly significant endeavor. The tlist is long, and even individual group accounts can get voluminous.

But anyway, doop-dee-doop, just cruising along the other day and — hello, what’s this?

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Let’s Enjoy POPPING EMO Together

/ Homicidol Maniac

I assume that you all have been enjoying POPPING EMO over the past several months, anyway, but I also assume that all of idol was frozen in carbonite in mid-February and is only now being thawed out, so it’s in fact neither here nor there that this randomly SCRAMBLES-aligned group up and dropped like 20 tracks onto Soundcloud the other day. Right? Like, their Twitter looks fine, albeit short of details. Nothing actually happened, right?

Consider this post an opportunity to get re-acquainted, which you could say may have been my motivation for making it in the first place and not be wrong!

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The Latest from PIIIIIIIN Is a Lot of Being PIIIIIIIN

/ Homicidol Maniac

Well, okay, maybe it’s not quite as over-the-top as all that, but I was brought into all of the update-y stuff for this post by a Soundcloud notification, and the first thing I saw from it was the song title and my mind did all of the requisite stuff from there, actual facts on the ground that were to be subsequently discovered be damned.

PIIIIIIIN, who technically can only exist when they have seven members, have yet another new regime of seven members, and to commemorate the latest changeover dropped this new number that, correct, did scare me on their behalf, but just turns out to be a nice homage rather than what the past 16 months in idol have us so conditioned for: Continue reading →