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Your Homicidols Weekender #248

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! Has life treated you kindly this week? I mean, in the context of *waves hands at nothing in particular*. I’m excited, personally, because a whole bunch of things are coming to a head. Big changes afoot! And for a person who’s easily defined as “set in his ways, does not like change,” that I’m anything other than completely terrified is a genuinely nice feeling.

After the way last week ended, it’s also nice to have just kind of a straightforward, comfortable body of extra stuff to make a Weekender. Despite a bit of pre-TIF quiet, our scene is still bursting with energy and lots of (mostly) good things. Take advantage! Find the things you like, and open yourself up to liking new things. If there’s one thing idol’s good at, it’s always having lots of new things.

That’s What You Think Idol’s Good At?

Hey! We got Team all up in this feature, plus lots of other good stuff that you should read and follow:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #245

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! Oh you guys, I am so damn tired. The silly season at work is winding down after a few months of ramping up. The last two weeks have been work-work-work, but finally we start to close the book beginning today. I’m quite jazzed when I’m not staring blankly at a computer screen, mind vacant from exhaustion!

But notably, two years ago this time was when my brain broke and I made the first of two stress-induced disappearing acts. After getting that all sorted (during the friggin pandemic no less) and actually getting not just to the heart of the matter, but to remedial and therapeutic approaches, not only do I feel a tiny fraction of that old stress, but it’s much more deal-withable besides. And so I like to think of this time of year as my own personal Mental Health Awareness Week Or So, and I am definitely right now encouraging you to seek help for any of the myriad things that could be weighing you down or stressing you out.

And with that said, this is where I get to say that I barely paid attention to idol this week, so it’s a short Weekender and I’m sorry. At #245, I get to lay a few eggs, you know?

A Few?

Well, didn’t we time that most recent top 50 post well? New FRUITPOCHETTE single:

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Your Homicidols Weekender #244

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! Or as good as it can be — there’s a sort of hell-in-a-handbasket thing going on in the news right now, like everywhere. Even our distractions are terrible. I caught a few minutes of the Olympic Open Ceremony last night and just couldn’t deal with not just the empty stadium, but the fact that it shouldn’t be happening anyway, like nobody other than a handful of rich people really want this to go off. And at roughly the same time, a young hockey player whose rap sheet is longer than his career highlights and who literally said he shouldn’t be drafted into the NHL was drafted in the first round anyway. The world can be so poisonous.

But here we are, and sometimes it’s important to remember that we only have any kind of control as far as our own lives go. That’s good, actually, and it means that we can form the world a bit around ourselves, find things that make it work for us. And, ah, ahem, look at this Weekender and all of the fun in it!

Also go read the latest installment of the countdown, and comment about how mad you are that the thing you like didn’t crack the top 20!

Presumptuous, Aren’t We?

Oh lord, they let BiSH join LINE:

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This Is a Short Post about Wonder Lander

/ Homicidol Maniac

It’s possible that no unit in idol has, over the now nearly five years of Weekendering, made more appearances as the Idol in Focus than Wonder Lander. Which is a huge shame, actually! Wonder Lander’s a cool group. It’s just that we usually get material from them in little bits and pieces, so maybe but annually do we actually make a whole-ass post out of them. This is one of those times!

And the occasion is that there are some newer tracks that I’ll share from various sources so it’s easy to follow them on many platforms!

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

/ Homicidol Maniac

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 →

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:

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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:

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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 →

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!

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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:

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