Bright and early!
Straightener is here to rock with the help of Tabu Zombie from SOIL & “PIMP” SESSIONS and Kunikazu Tanaka on glorious sax. A song so epic it could only be the opening theme to the RPG-style live action drama Yusha Yoshihiko Chapter 2.
Another round of wacky and zany music videos from Japan.
Bath time! Weird Byo no Shogeki is back with a sexy video although glasses gets the last laugh.
Happy new year!
Let’s start the new year off right with Shugo’s new shadow-play video for “Linne.” It’s from his excellent 2010 album Port Entropy, which is *gasp* coming out in America next month!
Hey, those polls meant something! Here’s your top voted videos for 2010. The final 14 videos had a total of 5 votes or more. I felt sorry for those with only 4 votes so they made the runners-up list. Honestly, there were a lot of great videos with even less votes than that so I decided to make a personal list in the future. Vote for your top 3 videos of the year and I’ll give the winner a “fan favorite” award!
The pants-dropping 0.8syooogeki had the most voted video. Definitely one of the craziest videos I’ve seen this year. If no one votes this week consider them the default winner!
What time is it? It’s Friday. Time for videos and junk. Let’s do this shit.
I’ve listened to ent and I’ve listened to FULLARMOR, but for some reason I’ve managed to avoid Mr. Horie’s bread winner STRAIGHTENER. And that’s a shame because “Man-like Creatures” is indie-rock goodness. Full of epic soundscapes and dreamy verses. I guess all that’s left to say is HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE WORLD.
Dutifully, here is the second installment of J-Rock Fridays. This week we have two ambient artists from Preco Records, a screamo band, my favorite electronic song ever, and a flamboyant K-Pop artist.
A neat little stop-motion/animated video starring the one man band known as ent. A mix of electronica, rock, and very decent English vocals. I was surprised to find out that ent is actually Atsuhi Horie, the vocalist of STRAIGHTENER. I never really liked them, but what I’ve heard from ent is marvelous. Ent’s debut album Welcome Stranger is available to order from Preco Records. I’ll definitely pick this up soon. http://www.myspace.com/entjp
This may or may not be a strange vocal interpretation of Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie compositions. I pulled out my copy of Pull The Rabbit Ears, but it doesn’t say a damn thing. All I know is that this song makes me happy sad and makes me want to dance around my room. It’s a fun song, but such a downer compared to the rest of the hyper happy songs on the album. I guess that’s why I like it. Enjoy the mp3. http://www.myspace.com/pineam
For the anime fans: Makota Shinkai (Voices of a Distant Star, 5 Centimeters Per Second) used Satie’s original Gymnopedie 1.0 in his short Other Worlds.
When the leaf seared is just one of many awesome screamo bands on Theory & Practice Records. The video is very stylish, not unlike the look and sound of Underoath or whatever hard bands the cool kids are listening to these days. But I really do love the screaming in this song. http://www.myspace.com/whentheleafseared
This is the type of video electronic stores play on loop to display their HD TVs. The animation matches well with the ambient-electronic song, which is not so fun to listen to in itself. This is the second Preco Records artist this week. They just released his debut album MISC in July. http://www.myspace.com/fredricsonmusic
All I’m going to say is major LOL.
Well, that’s all I got for this week. I’ll be back 2 weeks from now. But I’ll have a few more posts up before that hopefully 🙂
J-Rock Explosion 