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I Don’t Always Listen to Live Idol Albums, But When I Do, I Prefer PassCode’s

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This post is entirely about doing three things:

  1. Posting about PassCode, which we don’t get to do enough
  2. Enjoying a PassCode album, as we haven’t had a new one in a while
  3. Spreading the gospel and hooking in some people who maybe aren’t as familiar

Anyway, let the title describe it for you. I almost always pass on live records from big idol gigs, the exception to date being the OG Red Night/Black Night Babymetal recordings. There’s just only so much time and unfathomable amounts of music to fill it with, and I may love idol but I also love a lot of other things; if I wanted to listen to off-quality recordings of people who for the most part aren’t particularly good singers in the first place, I’d invite my friends over for DIY karaoke again. Continue reading →

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Your Homicidols Weekender #236

/ Homicidol Maniac / 1 Comment

Good morning! My goodness, a ton of things happened this week. And very little of it bad! That’s really the marker, I think. The biggest impact thing here at Maniac Mansion was literal impact — a neighbor’s ginormous tree snapped at the base of the trunk and managed to fall in the only direction it could without really destroying things, but it did manage to crush my fence. I was displeased! And these aren’t the kindly old family next door who bring me mail and chat me up in the yard, they’re the fundagelicals who only recently stopped trying to get me to go to church with them. Am I surprised that they haven’t made a move to get the dang trunk off of my fence so I can call the insurance company? I tell you, friend, I am not.

But other impacts! Like, just so much great music, idol and otherwise. We posted a lot, this is a loaded Weekender, and there’s a whole side list of things that came up in various contexts that I just don’t have a great venue to share with you. And that’s okay! The Thai shoegaze idol group that Cal found, though, that I’m sharing with you here.

Anyway, you all please do have a great weekend. It’s a holiday here in the USA so I’m going to be serious about catching up on some personal projects and otherwise shutting off my very busy brain. We all deserve a break sometimes.

Says the Guy Who Doesn’t Post Enough!

I’m far more excited about the new BiSH album than I probably should be, largely because this is an excellent promo for it:

Continue reading →

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Your Homicidols Weekender #234

/ Homicidol Maniac

Welcome back to Saturday! It is just full-glory spring beautiful here at Maniac Mansion, and yours truly is going to spend the whole dang day outside if possible. Yes, the cicada invasion is underway, but they’re minding their business so far and leaving a comparatively low number of corpses scattered on the walk. Soon their songs will begin, and then it’s GOODBYE SLEEP for a few weeks.

Good week in idol, pretty okay Weekender. Let’s get to it.

Peppy

Do you have any idea how many friggin’ pitches for a story like this I presented between 2016 and 2018? At last, though:

Continue reading →

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Old School Idolcore Fans, Come Enjoy the 340.29m/s EP with Me

/ Homicidol Maniac

Without quite going right back over the same kind of territory that I covered in my original Let’s Discover of these folks, I say again that I loved me some sugartrap, and while 340.29m/s isn’t a 1:1 there, they’re still in the same musical tradition, which is to say idolcore from that glorious 2014-17(?) period when the synths were as heavy as the percussion and the shark hadn’t quite been jumped just yet. Yes, of course some groups were better than others in the first place, and the ones that did rise from the chika morass to make something more of themselves than a handful of CD-Rs and hundreds if not thousands of stilted cheki usually did so on the backs of bigger funding and a running start, but to me idolcore (and I specifically mean this exact flavor of idolcore) is and will always be the sound of Getting Into Idol.

Not a whole lot of groups are still doing it, though, is the point. There are a few, for sure, but even the remnants of acts from that era have either moved on musically or moved up, if you get my meaning. Idol’s a business, after all, and even the most meager of amateur friends-on-a-lark acts would probably prefer to do things that people want to see and hear. And that, for me, is part of the charm of the idolcore die-hards — they’re like Saxon or (gods help us all) Whitesnake in that they could stop at any time, but there are still enough fans to support them that there’s really no reason to change.

This post was supposed to be more of a celebration of 340.29m/s and the release of the record and I went and turned it into a backhanded celebration of commitment. So let’s re-tool real quick-like and actually listen to the dang record! Which those of you who nodded at any point in the preceding two paragraphs will probably like a whole lot if you haven’t already given it several spins! But I think you’ll agree with me that, while the sound is a certain kind of nostalgic, it’s also fresh and good. Continue reading →

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Have We Really Not Said Anything about the TOKYO TEFUTEFU Stuff?

/ Homicidol Maniac

Whoops! We here on Team Homicidols are obviously supporters of Codomomental, including and especially the artists employed therein. It is therefore an all-time embarrassment when we, uh, kind of forget to do something with a Codomomental release because *brain fart*. It’s only been a week but what with various other goings on it does feel a little bit more. So here we go.

Hey! Remember how Codomomental debuted two projects in the past six or so months, and one of them is clearly further along than the other for they have two singles and a whole-ass album out, and that one is TOKYO TEFUTEFU? You do — cool. So yeah, that album’s out now, and therefore the boss was obliged to drop an MV to support the release, and to my complete lack of surprise it was for their best song to date, and … here you go!

Continue reading →

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Your Homicidols Weekender #232

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! Just, uh:

That’s the latest gag that I’ve been running into the ground here at Maniac Mansion. Just a laugh a minute over here, folks.

Anyway, yes, spring has completely sprung and we have less than a week before billions of buzzy hell monsters erupt from the ground and make our next 40 or so days just astonishingly annoying. This impending cicada invasion is lots of fun to talk about with the people who’ve never experienced it. They’ll be all, oh, so there’ll be a lot of bugs? And you very patiently try to explain that “a lot” cannot contain the right emotional heft of having the damn things join you in the car, follow you into the house, decide to dive-bomb into your carefully concealed cup of beer, and that this isn’t the way a summertime night will often sound with crickets and stuff galore, it’s more like a motorcycle that never stops cycling, and oh yeah they all die pretty much at once in the span of a few days so then their corpses are a pain in the ass too. Fiancee herself wasn’t around for the last run of these suckers, so I’m trying to fill her head with wild stories of the things nesting in her hair and stuff. Can’t wait til they arrive!

BUT AS FOR IDOL, holy crap, we really are back into idol spring, aren’t we? It is interesting how a lot of units are eschewing video now and going straight to the streamers when they have new stuff. So the Weekender, which can be damn near anything from one week to another, looks really different hear, and posting in general’s going to be different for sure, and … well, just go look at it. Lots and lots of stuff, and thank the gods that it’s from a lot of groups. I was getting tired of mostly talking about the same 50 things over and over. But like this guy’s so full that I’m biting off more than I can chew for follow-up posts. Good times!

Also if you can go watch whatever’s left of the Codomomental stream on YouTube, someone made a very special appearance and announcement.

Wait What?

Kindly raise your hand if you didn’t see this coming, so we can all laugh at you/call you a liar:

Continue reading →

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And Also GREAT MONKEYS’s

/ Homicidol Maniac

As soon as I hit the publish button on that the mishmash post:

Correct you are, Chris! And because I have unofficially vowed to unabashedly support every idol thing that Julie does, and also because GREAT MONKEYS are great fun, let’s give this one a listen, too, shall we? Continue reading →

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We Finally Got the the mishmash EP!

/ Homicidol Maniac

I will tell you, I noticed on the TL the other day that the mishmash had a release date for a new EP, and I got super excited about it, and only in the mental preparation for this post did I come to see that the record’s title and title track itself (and #2!) have been with us for months via MV, and so there would be no MV associated with this release, and so I was going to be a jerk about it and not post, but then I actually listened to it all and while I remember not really caring for the title track, I did find that the overall spirit of the release (and okay, the rest of the songs) was actually nice and fun, and I’m in a mood, so let’s do it!

I don’t expect you all to like this the way that I expect you all to like, say, something from PassCode or whatever, but I do expect some of you to like it, and you know who you are, because you’ve been bopping ever since you hit play. Me, it’s not my favorite thing that mishmash (+/- the) ever did, and frankly I preferred their closer-to-OG sound, but groups get refreshes all the time and maybe now was that time for the mishmashes. And who knows? Maybe there’s room for greaser idols out there, too.

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Homicidols Investigates: Osaka Shunkashuto

/ Homicidol Maniac / 2 Comments

You may have seen the news that, for the first time in more than four years, Osaka Shunkashuto* is losing a member. That’s sad for them! But it also rekindled a thread of discussion in Team chat last week about Syukasyun, about whether they are in fact still good or are now boring. I thought this warranted investigation!

Background: I loved Osaka Shunkashuto. During that formative I-want-to-hear-it-all period, my first exposure to them was the incomparable “C’mon!”. Of course I wanted to hear a lot more from them after that. Sure, the indie work wasn’t all hits, but that era of the group, doing fun rock covers and channeling throwback R&B and soul in a way that nobody else was while old boss Soezimax helped them develop gripping video content, they felt undeniable and inevitable.

You know who else loves Osaka Shunkashuto? Chris does. I recall that some of our earliest interactions were about the group, including during the period that I believe began in earnest only after they signed with Avex but maybe during the time with Fujiyama Project, which is when the shade began. Not from Chris; oh no, the man is a true believer. From me, you see, and I feel like my increasing frustration with the group that really began around the “New Me” single and definitely peaked with the SSFW album was perhaps a little too pointed and vocal, for Chris would chastise me for it. He would also insist that no matter how much kvetching I did, SSFW was in fact good and fun.

Nonetheless, this argument was broached against last week, when Chris asserted (no, I will not give you context) that if only we/I would give Syukasyun another chance (now, at least two years since I wrote them off forever), then we/I would see the truth. That this was asserted in the context of allowing that yes, the case was undermined by recent-est work, only served to embolden my commitment to the assertion that SSFW is boring. However, being the kind and generous and extremely handsome Maniac that I am, I deigned to quite literally hear the two competing arguments as to whether Osaka Shunkashuto is boring and then render a flawless, beautiful verdict that cannot ever be questioned.

Bring on the evidence! Continue reading →

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Hikicomo Teikoku, New Single, Various

/ Homicidol Maniac

It is incumbent upon those of us who like to follow newly emerged loudol acts to continuously follow those newly emerged loudol acts. Some make it easier than others, yes, and there are always plenty whose inevitable two-months-later demise elicits the “Oh no! Anyway” meme more than any actual upset, but I think it’s necessary for a person in my exalted position to routinely revisit the promising newbies, try to drive some energy their way, bolster the ol’ get-up-and-go, you know?

So, among my personal favorite 2020 debuts that I was kind of late to the party on we have Hikicomo Teikoku, the shut-in idols whose very existence is so meta that I can barely stand it. They have a new single, obviously, or rather did two weeks ago, but I haven’t done a thing yet to make you all want to hear it or potentially later buy it from them, so let’s talk about it, and also check in more while we’re at it! Continue reading →

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