This New NEO JAPONISM Single Is Fire

/ Homicidol Maniac

If you’ve been around Homicidols Dot Com to a while, you’ve probably seen me refer to a certain preference for Osaka idols. Something — in the water, probably — about idols from Osaka seems to make them do louder music with some more interesting twists, to the point that there’s a bit of a stylistic signature that sets Osaka idols apart from, say, Nagoya or Tokyo scenes.

I bring this up with NEO JAPONISM because it is, coming from me, a form of real praise to say that they’re the most Osaka idols based in Tokyo, and I’m becoming ever more convinced that they’re going to be a real driving force in how idol and loud are combined in the coming years. I keep rolling my eyes when I see them referring to this as their first single and MV, but a deeper look through all of my hyperventilating posts from the last several months suggests that it is true.

Or, the Truth:


I always love the percussion in these songs

What a song! NEO JAPONISM has not-so-subtly had a hell of a year (their album, which sits half-reviewed in my personal queue and is now past the point of passe, is really great), which is their debut year because December, which really just muddles up The Year of Idol Revival that 2018 turned out to be. “Carry ON” probably bears a few more listens, but let’s talk about just how hard I went in for this song within the first few bars. I actually giggled — quietly, because that’s weird — when the first chorus hit and we took that swerve into oh-right-it’s-an-idol-song, and I had this thought that I usually have in other circumstances* that saw this long deterministic line from ALL is VANITY PassCode right into the heart of this song. It was a neat experience, traveling backwards to move forward in history and seeing how one kind of style in idol reached something of a natural conclusion. It could also be complete poppycock, the kind that only comes from posting before caffeine!

Also that MV makes me think of this thing that Spineshank did in like 2001, and I hadn’t thought of Spineshank in a while, so that was doubly neat. Like this shirt:

NEO JAPONISM is releasing this puppy next week, then following it up with a free outdoor live. If you’re in Tokyo, go.

*I have this thing that certain musicians at certain times are unfortunately a few years ahead of everybody else, and what they do would be accurately described as being “what X should have been,” X referring to a particular genre or style; a good example is Candiria and “this is what I wish people meant when they said ‘metalcore’.” It goes in both directions, with music either being out of place in the timeline by being too early, or being exactly what a vision of a thing would look like after several years of development. Hence, the above