Zenbu Kimi no Sei Da

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Back when I was but a new, budding Maniac, I’d let YouTube take me on these incredible journeys. It had made me a BiS list, for instance, and I’d let that sucker run for hours at a time at work. I can’t even begin to try to number how many groups I found that way; it’s a lot. And some of them wound up being just kind of there in the end, while others were awesome enough that I wanted to learn more about them and eventually start a music website with them as a focus … and then there was Zenbu Kimi no Sei Da.

Hot. Damn.

One thing that happens to just about everybody while they’re discovering the hard side of idol is that moment, or maybe it’s many moments, when you just sit there and watch a video play through like five times, trying to figure out just what the hell you’re watching and listening to these incredibly dense, rich, violent songs and make sense of them.

Zenbu Kimi no Sei Da (“It’s All Your Fault”) came along at a very ripe moment. Babymetal was conquering the world, BiSH was stepping into BiS’s shadow, groups like PassCode and Party Rockets were showing that idols could do music both hard and accessible … in other words, somebody who was willing to put all of that up there together was going to get attention in a good way.

A couple of digital singles and an album later, Kiminosei have become regulars on the rock+idol scene, and they’re at the forefront of the yami-kawaii … movement? scene? something. Regardless, it’s a fantastic way to approach performance, all twisted emotions and sickly appearance and bent expectations. You’d see them and be like “Oh how cool, they look like an A-pop grou–” and then get stabbed in the face. Like, remember GoGo Yubari from the Kill Bill movies? She’d probably be all about this (when she wasn’t working as a creative director for Deep Girl).

What they sound like

Mix one part J-pop and one part hardcore, place in blender, drizzle in denpa. Between them and sister group Yukueshirezutsurezure, they’re charting this beautifully tortured space that I hope goes really far.

You’ll like them if

I don’t have a good comparison for this one. Maybe if you like Converge and Dempagumi.inc all in the same day, or you remember that little window of time when Hole was just a tiny bit poppy and you approved. They have moments that actually aren’t that far from Bad Religion.