Rock Idols
For pages and posts that relate to idol groups with a distinctly rock sound.
Show Report: ATARASHII GAKKO! U.S. Debut at Head in the Clouds
It has been a rough couple of years since COVID curtailed two of my favorite past-times (travel and live music) and my absolute favorite thing (traveling to see live music). This past weekend’s trip to Los Angeles for the U.S. debut of ATARASHII GAKKO! at the Head in the Clouds festival was both my first trip and my first music festival in over two years.
So many things have changed!!
Not only is travel and the festival-going experience itself radically different from the pre-COVID era, I realized that the nature of these show reports also needs to evolve since the last time I wrote one up. The recent ubiquity of concert livestreams (perhaps the only positive outcomes of the global pandemic) means that most of you readers who were interested in seeing the show have already done so via Amazon, Twitch or a bootleg upload on YouTube. This relieves me of my pre-COVID responsibility of composing a written portrait of the show itself, so I’ll focus on the elements of the festival experience that didn’t get captured on video (including a surprise close encounter with AG! themselves: READ ON!). Continue reading
When Monkeys Become Goats
Last we heard of the infamous BANANA MONKEYS they had vanished, seemingly for good, following the graduation of their last founding member, Tenka no Chanyuki. “What now?” several of us cried. “How can we, as idol wota, possibly go on without Banamon’s primal reign of homelessness, sex work and whatever the hell that one music video was!?”
Well, you could just watch any episode of Hollyoaks for that, but if trashy British soaps aren’t your thing, you can rest easy, because Banamon are back! Sort of. The remaining members are back, with a new girl, and they’re not monkeys any more. In fact, they’re a completely different species! Welcome, BLUEGOATS.
アイドルグループ『BLUEGOATS』デビューします。
11月7日(日)、下北沢WAVERにてお披露目。
YouTubeにてデビュー曲を限定公開してるので、聴いてくれたら嬉しいですhttps://t.co/Ks7k02lbOt pic.twitter.com/szcM2STM6m
— BLUEGOATS (@info_bluegoats) October 24, 2021
Get Pumped Up with Re:INCARNATION’s New Single
What was I saying the other day about units still making pretty good approaches to punk rock? In this case, Re:INCARNATION is sending us the kind of pop punk anthem that really can only exist in the context of idol, and it’s exactly what I needed to be listening to right now heading into a brutal last day to a brutal week, and I hope you get a good lift out of it too:
This sucker is out on the first, but you obviously don’t need to wait to listen to it, just to buy. So buy it.
This Is a New Single from Haruno Yumu
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
Let’s Discover Some Idols: Fiore
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
In a Very Important Friday Tradition, We Have New STARMARIE
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
This Is Not the Shithatsu-machi Underground MV I Wanted, But It’s the Shihatsu-machi Underground MV I Got, And That’s Fine
So last week, while writing up my own little contribution to our ongoing all-time top 50 albums project, I was re-listening to Shihatsu-machi Underground’s self-titled for probably the 100th time and casually adding them to the list of groups that, going into 2020, really felt like they might be on the cusp of great things (before, you know). And I won’t walk that back because I’m a fan, though I will allow that a certain bias may tinge the perspective — the whole reason that Shihatsu-machi made it onto our countdown at all is because of the unique alignment of the people on Team and the spectrum of tastes among us; obviously we aren’t talking about a hugely influential group or release here (not yet), but rather one that holds up in our opinion as just being remarkably good. Continue reading
UNDER BEASTY Got Themselves a TV Show Theme
Where my other old-time UNDER BEASTY fans at? This is so cool, right? Our girls landed themselves a TV show theme, and while it is pretty standard idorock, it’s good standard idorock, and with a cool MV to boot:
UB’s soon to celebrate their seventh anniversary (as UNDER BEASTY). I’m always so happy for them.
This is a very short post because I’m on a train
It’s Good to See PapiRosier After All This Time
Some idol groups, even those that are just grinding away on chika stage after chika stage, release tons of material and as a result are super accessible; others … not so much. I do have a gift for recall, fortunately, so it’s rare to really, truly forget about a unit once introduced, but as time goes on and life’s priorities change, I do have to admit to being surprised when certain projects pop up from the blind spots in my mind.
Like PapiRosier, who released this MV the other day for their new single! This is the first thing I wrote about them, in the summer of 2016; we have averaged 0.8 post per year from them since, as that seems to be the approximate release schedule. And given how things change over time and the whole “heavy idol” thing has run its course in certain ways, I fully expected this MV to be a simple, sparkling idol song, probably kind of anthemic because that’s what they do, but bereft of much in the way of rock sounds and definitely not something to blog a post about: Continue reading
