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Your Homicidols Weekender #249

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! It’s a special one here at Maniac Mansion — or, more specifically, a hotel room about 100 miles from Maniac Mansion. Your faithful proprietor is getting married today. Sorry ladies! But I write from the hotel where I’m sequestered away from my extremely awesome partner until this afternoon, when we finally get to tie the knot. There are some resulting things afoot, but this is neither the time nor the place. Instead, I’ll simply reference that being around a lot of not-that-well acquaintances means explaining two things, those being my tattoos and my “J-pop website,” which in this particular group happens to include the mother of one of the mods from the Sakura Gakuin subreddit. Don’t ask me how any of that makes sense, it just always seems to.

This is an awesome weekend, and I’m really excited to get down to it. And I hope you have a blast of your own!

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Put Up Your Dukes and Fight with buGG

/ Homicidol Maniac

It finally arrived! I first listened to buGG’s new “MY FIGHT SONG” single what feels like a couple of weeks ago, on the Spotify, and figured that there’d be an MV at some point. And now there is!

Watching buGG grow from the fun sidecar PIIIIIIIN little sisters into, well, very much their own thing has been cool. They still have that signature impossible energy and outright bounce to their sound. I just can’t believe it’s only their second single ever! I mean, the discography available online isn’t exactly sparse, just that, like, you usually expect way more singles than other releases, this being idol and all. They’ve only been at this for like three years! But anyway:

Fun fact: Everything about this is hundreds of percents cooler than every American pop punk thing ever done

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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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Let’s Discover Some Idols: PUNKY RAD PINK

/ Homicidol Maniac

This is a Let’s Discover Some Idols that has been entirely too long in the making. I don’t even remember when I first found PUNKY RAD PINK, but it was a while ago, and they just sat unremarked-upon in my dang queue not quite as long as Fiore did, for instance, but long enough to be shameful. So let’s get right to it!

Hey, have you guys ever heard of PUNKY RAD PINK (Twitter)? You will note, as if it is impossible not to, that they are extremely accurately named, and as such are pretty much bound to be a good time. They’re part of the somewhat cursed class of spring 2020, the Coronaclass if you will, and so may have flown under your radar — I was on hiatus at the time, so at least I have an excuse!

They have no official MVs that I’ve found, but they do have plenty of live video on their channel. For instance:

Membership changes, man

And here’s from their first one-man a few months back: Continue reading →

This Is a New Single from Haruno Yumu

/ Homicidol Maniac

When you’ve been at this idol game for a while, not only do you find yourself with a startling amount of otherwise useless knowledge, the amount of recall you’ve built up as a bank gets to be almost harrowing to consider. I had the privilege of talking about ye olde website and its advent a couple of weeks back with a friend who I hadn’t seen in years, for instance, and after getting through the tl;dr Homicidols Elevator Pitch, he sort of good-naturedly challenged me on just how much there would really be to talk about. I made him look through our archives on his phone while I narrated the process of discovering literally hundreds of loud-aligned idol groups over time, and following his surprise waxed nostalgic on certain acts from way back in the day, names like petit pas! and THE SPUNKY and Tsubasa Fly, names you might not recognize if you’ve only been around in the past couple of years. And then I enjoyed telling him about the long-timers that are still out there! Your You’ll Melt More! and NECRONOMIDOL and … UNDER BEASTY. And that’s when I kind of lit up, for not only do I love them all, but UB holds a very special place in my heart for having navigated their way from a truly indie origin all the way to a major label. Anybody who’s ever turned to their idiot friends and said “we should start a band!” (as I had several times with the friend mentioned here) can relate to the excitement that wells up inside in those moments — and UB lived it.

So yeah, while I did just get to post about UNDER BEASTY recently and reflect a bit on that trajectory therein, here’s another chance because Yumu just dropped her second single: Continue reading →

Your Homicidols Weekender #247

/ Homicidol Maniac

Good morning! I’m all the way back this week — it wasn’t until late last Friday that I realized my abode for the weekend had no wi-fi and I’m too dang old to try to make these posts work in mobile browsers anymore — and while the Weekender is fine and good and this one full of things, I must admit to still being shook about that thing yesterday. It’s like the first time you read from Capital and realize that Santa’s elves are effectively slaves, except without ironic humor.

But anyway, allow me to note that your keeping up an interest in Japanese music, up to and including and especially idol, is still perfectly fine. Toxic personalities and abusive practices (hell, and structures) don’t go away because you stop paying attention to them; you follow this stuff because you care about it and the people who do it, so it stands to reason that you’d want to be part of shining lights on examples good and bad and insisting on better.

And with that out of the way, let’s make the most we can out of a few days with no work and lots of opportunity to do the things we enjoy. We earned it!

Earned What?

Two hours of MIGMA SHELTER, anyone?

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Let’s Discover Some Idols: Fiore

/ Homicidol Maniac

So the past few weeks have been just incredibly busy with Day Job and various other affairs with Fiancee and the regular business here at Maniac Mansion, so I’ve been a terrible proprietor. Don’t think I haven’t been paying some attention, though; in fact, one could argue that I was actually trying to observe idol even more than usual because a person can really only spend so much mental energy monitoring chats in Zoom rooms before needing to waste time on other things. A Twitter feed, for instance. And it was in so doing that one reference led to another and finally to a name that was kind of familiar but I simply could not place. A new idol?

Not at all! In fact, a search of drafts showed that I had originally wanted to cover Fiore here (Twitter) ALL THE WAY BACK IN 2017 thanks to a referral from our old pal Pure Idol Heart. This is how you clear out a backlog! Continue reading →

I Need to Post Something and SHINGEKI Is Definitely Something

/ Homicidol Maniac

We’ll, we’re two weeks late to this party and you really do run out of things to say about SHINGEKI after a while, so this is going to be one of the least interesting posts in the long, agonizing history of Homicidols Dot Com. But hey, new MV, completely bonkers, you know the drill:

I actually unironically love it! Also unironically love this tweet for just plain putting it out there:

Remember, this group is going to Budokan.

In a Very Important Friday Tradition, We Have New STARMARIE

/ Homicidol Maniac

When was the last time we got to do a STARMARIE post? I know things have been weird out there, but Friday and STARMARIE used to go together like spaghetti and meat sauce (which is to say, deliciously). Yeah, more often than not it was just live clips, but what’s wrong with that? Truth be told, ol’ STARMARIE hasn’t done a whole lot of new material in recent times, and IIRC it’s been almost a year since their last release, and nowadays Homicidols Dot Com really relies on those new releases to have things to talk about.

BUT THIS IS A STARMARIE POST, and if there’s one thing that STARMARIE has always been good at providing, it’s cool idorock befitting their gimmick as like guardians of esoteric knowledge or what have you, but actually more precisely it’s cool idorock that works well as theme songs for other media. And here we are again! I was very pleased to find that STARMARIE had a whole new MV for a whole new song, like just generally, and deeply unsurprised to see that it’s a theme for a movie: Continue reading →

I Enjoy This Particular BiSH Song Template

/ Homicidol Maniac

So as I was saying before, I had pretty high hopes for this BiSH album (out now!), and they graced us this morning with another MV from it, which:

I am supposed to be working right now, so this is also very short, so let’s suffice it to say that while the opening worried me that we had another “Orchestra” clone, “BE READY” here is more reminiscent of stuff from the FAKE METAL JACKET era, which for my money was actually the superior point in BiSH anthems, though now it’s both grown up and does include some tropes familiar to anybody who likes WACK artists or even just SCRAMBLES products.

I get to listen to the album today and remain pretty stoked about it.