First things first: TORICAGO is doing a 5:00 a.m. Saturday JST livestream which translates to about 4:00 pm Friday EST in the U.S. UPDATE: Event time changed to 4:00 am JST ; 3:00 pm EST. Hopefully you are reading this Friday morning so you can catch that to kick off your weekend right.
The big event this weekend is the @JAM ONLINE FESTIVAL featuring over 100 different idol units of both the traditional and alternative variety on five stages over two days. Continue reading
Excuse me:
Is the new Toricago MV coming in a later post or was it missed
— Andrew [Church of Kai][482][コマチ&ヨネコforミスiD2020] (@Eyex1st) September 14, 2019
EXCUSE ME:
Not mentioning and cheering the new @toricago MV. Pretty strange. No steak for you pic.twitter.com/BLFTwmvtEW
— motterbach (@motterbach69) September 15, 2019
Look, does anybody here really think that I’d deliberately miss out of one of my favorite groups?
Yes?
Come on! Toricago was part of the reason why I felt like I should try to catch up on the week as opposed to just nod at it and move on with my life. Let’s look at it together! Continue reading
So with time a-wastin’ for the physical release of their latest album (their third) (because you could have been streaming it for weeks!), Toricago went the route of prepping us metaphysically by releasing … well, it’s a lyric video. But rather than the industry-standard I-cranked-this-out-on-my-Mac-in-a-couple-of-hours approach, this one does at least have some style to it, and the song’s lovely in its way and yeah I know that there’s going to be more postable stuff from one of the best things about last year’s class of debuts, and soon, but it’s been too long and also this is at least named for one of my favorite personal years, so:
I was going to try to make more of this yesterday but flat ran out of time for it, but if you were aware of its release, you no doubt knew in your heart of hearts that this post would be blogged: Yes, Maniac bias Toricago did in fact release a new MV yesterday, and yes I smashed the hell out of that Play button as soon as an opportunity was presented. And what’s the occasion? As far as I can tell: Because they can. Which, hey sure, that’s kind of your MO as a group, and I’m sure that there’ll be more than enough of that attitude on display in this photobook that you’re promoting via image of member wrapped in gauze.
Anyway, the MV:
Full disclosure: I’m personally somewhat less enthusiastic about this one than pretty much everything else from Toricago that I’ve ever had the pleasure of covering. Not because of the song’s character, mind you — if I discounted every culturally homi-viable idol as a result of occasional ballads, I’d have nothing left to write too-long sentences online about — but because on top of having all the teeth of a newborn, it’s surprisingly meek even when it should have more emotional lift. Didn’t expect that from Toricago! I mean, it’s nice and all, but I don’t do this business for nice! I do it for everything but nice no matter how nice a nice thing can sometimes be!
We’ve gone through quite a bit as loudol fans in these early months of 2019. Hell, being even passingly familiar with the idol scene in general has been an invitation to a shitshow lately. It’s wild, and a lot of the established names and faces that helped to form our community’s sense of stability have been through a brutal wringer.
Things do have a silver lining, though, and maybe this year’s apocalypse of loss and sadness and rage can be laid next to the ongoing emergence of a new generation of talents who are stepping up in all kinds of interesting ways. And in that group we can include Toricago, who I would be remiss to not point out as being just barely over a year from their debut but are operating on such a professional and well-executed and sort of nouveau-fresh level that I’m shocked that they haven’t completely conquered all before them yet.
Folks absolutely went off on Saturday when the group dropped this latest MV, which isn’t connected to their most recent (excellent) album, but is a limited single (until the next album, obvs) that necessitated heading to Hong Kong to shoot apparently. I had to skip it for two straight days because I was going in too many directions at once to try to put real attention on something, but now I’m here and brother am I ever glad I am:
Now, it took me almost 48 hours from the first hyperventilating accolades bursting through my feed to actually get to watch this, and goodness knows that I have a mess of hype-worthy things to deal with right now in like all media, so one must as a matter of simple psychological survival temper all that hype with a strong dose of counter-hype. “Oh how good could it be” is one such coping tactic! Continue reading
I’m a little bit of a Toricago fanatic, if you couldn’t tell. In fact, they’re the rare newish group to worm their way into Maniac’s Proprietary System for Following Idols for Blogging on Homicidols Dot Com. The catch is that, despite using a lot of the same reliable promotional norms of the industry, Toricago’s “announcement at 21:00!” tweets are as likely to result in new photos as they are anything else, and it gets to be a little bit of a drag after a while. Still, about once per quarter, the announced announcement is worth it.
Like when they hit you with an MV out of nowhere!
Your patience will rewarded with this one
The grind, when you’re a fancy idol website guy like me, can lead to weird surprises. Like, “oh cool, I actually already have two placeholder draft posts of that group that I’ve been meaning to talk about that just dropped the bitchin’ new MV” or, more appropriately in this case, “oh right, I’d wanted to do something with that and then lost it.” Thanks, Auhby, for reminding me about this very exciting announcement by Toricago and getting me to shift gears from what I had been writing up to ensure that I didn’t forget about this again!
So yeah, Toricago, new album, February. Because nothing good in life is ever easy, you, uh, have to go to their website to listen to the trailer, so do it on the link herein:
鶯籠 2nd アルバム「Legacy」
来年2月のリリースが決定🐧！i tunes、Apple Musicなどデジタル配信は1月5日（土）から先行配信スタート！https://t.co/yxfSE9UhRW
⇒ Trailerは公式HPにて視聴できます🐧#鶯籠 #Legacy #アルバム発売 pic.twitter.com/aEnCpx5X8z— 鶯籠 (@toricago_O) December 17, 2018
Toricago was by far my favorite new thing in idol in 2018, and I’m loving this look in at their development of the edgy-idol-chika thing along with the other big dominant trend, the artsier styles of rock and pop that have turned idol into one of the most reliable places to find cool and interesting new things. Let’s see where they’re able to take this; it’s only like two months away!
No lede necessary: Let’s drop the pretense and just get right down to it. Toricago, one of the definitive debuts of this glorious 2018, dropped a couple of clips from their live DVD that won’t be out until December but who cares, these are here now:
I know, shut up, I know that I gave the keys to Team, but I feel like I’m in on a glorious secret after only a handful of people made any hay out of Toricago’s new MV. If other folks want to miss out on this kind of glory, who am I to stop them?
Also what is this aspect ratio?
Update: And there’s an MV!
And more to the point, if you’re yet to get onto the Toricago bandwagon despite the pretty breathless reception that I’ve given them since their debut (in March, no less!), now might be a good time, because they might be ready to break out, and soon.
Their first album, i cAn FLY, sprang into existence on Tuesday, and it’s ready for you to download and whatnot:
【先行配信】今年3月に結成されたばかりのアイドル・グループ、鶯籠(@toricago_O)の1stアルバム『i cAn Fly』をリリース! 9月下旬のフィジカルの発売に先駆け、配信がスタートしております! OTOTOYではWAVをはじめとしたロスレスにて取り扱い中ですのでぜひチェックを! https://t.co/Z2GOns8wqg pic.twitter.com/iRiuyjPMUD
— オトトイ (@ototoy_info) August 29, 2018
Lots of idols release stuff all the time, you correctly point out, but you, Maniac, rarely make that much of a deal about it. What’s so special about this? I’ll tell you! It’s because we, as a community, are still mostly neck-deep in the acts that got us into idol in the first place (or their descendants/sisters), which largely scans to a 2014-16 time frame (thanks Babymetal!), and while we individually catch up with acts the correspond to our own biases over time, the tippy-top community favorites are largely unchanged over the last couple of years. Toricago, along with a handful of others who have debuted over the past year, has a chance to break some of that hegemony and potentially even be a standard-bearer for idols dispensing with the last generation’s New Way of Doing Things and forging on with scene-defining work of their own. Continue reading
