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Flow: United Sparrows

Flow has been doing music for Anime for a long time; they started playing together in 1991, and became FLOW in 1998. So far they have released 11 studio albums, 5 compilation albums, 5 Extended Play discs (averaging 6 songs each), 37 singles, and a handful of collaborations. With almost everything they have done being used as opening or closing songs for anime series, with the rest ending up in games tied to anime series, any Otaku reading this should already know them. On December 15th their new 6 track EP Dice comes out, with the 4 vocal tracks being the theme songs for 3 different new Anime series. The two instrumentals tracks on that EP are the Karaoke versions of two of those songs, which really increases sales in that part of the world; it certainly increases my desire to add it to my collection.

The first track is the TV-sized version of United Sparrows, the ED theme to Back Arrow, while the second is the full sized version of that same song. The 3rd piece is Dice, the OP for the 15th Anniversary Code Geass Lelouch of the Rebellion. For those curious, the other two anime-related tracks on the upcoming Dice EP are the themes to the game versions of Symphonic Psalm Eureka Seven HI-EVOLUTION and BanG Dream! Girls band party!. Since they are variations of the themes they did for the anime’s of each of those franchises, they should sound pretty familiar.



Radwimps 2021

It’s time to revisit Radwimps and see what kind of interesting music they have been coming up with in 2021. If their website comes up in Kanji, the first thing you can click on that isn’t the homepage will be the languages subfolder where you can set it to English. The first track is their new song Summer Daze, and yes, the first part is sung in English, with Closed Captioning when they switch to Japanese. The song was posted two weeks ago, and is just shy of half a million views at this point. The next song is called Utakata song by Google Translate, was posted 3 weeks ago, and managed to get 1.5M views in that time. For comparison, the final track included this time around is Is There Still Anything That Love Can Do? posted 2 years ago, with over 88M views.

Taka Rides Again; Renegades, Journey

One OK Rock lead singer Taka came out with a few tracks recently you should know about. First was an acoustic version of their recent song Renegades which are the first three videos listed here (acoustic version first, then original version, then a Making Of for the song). For the record, I think Renegades is the most important (or at least Politically Correct) song to come out of Asia in the last year or so. Then there were two duets he did with friends, the first here being the song Curtain Call with Shota Shimizu, the second is the cover of Journey’s song Open Arms with Arnel Pineda. And then, just for a treat, a radio interview with a fellow rocker! You can’t make this stuff up!

POLKADOT STINGRAY 2021

POLKADOT STINGRAY’s new song Aoi is the ending theme to the TV Anime Series “Godzilla Singular Point”, was posted last month, and is the first track in tonight’s assortment. I have to admit to being a little confused about why a music video for a song for a Gojira series is so obviously based on the 1987 Wim Wenders’ masterpiece Der Himmel über Berlin (called Wings of Desire for the English version). Or maybe it’s based on the 1998 American remake of that film, City of Angels but either way it was a treat to watch. The 2nd video is the Anime version of the same song, while the third is both live action and anime of their song Kenshin from their 3rd full album. The last video is the acoustic version of their song Pose, or at least as acoustic as something recorded with an electric guitar can be.

All of these tracks were posted by the band in the last 90 days. Like so many of the bands I have listed here since I migrated to the new server, I have lost their blog entries from the last few years, but still retain some older entries you might enjoy checking out.

New Songs This Week

Several of the bands I like posted new songs (or new versions of favorites) in the last 7 days, so I wanted to share a few of them here. First up is SCANDAL from a concert they did on April 18th of this year, a medley of two of their hits, Tonight and Eternal. The next track is BISH (sometimes referred to as the Punk band that doesn’t play any instruments) doing a live version of their song Sparks from their new release Stacking. After that BAND MAID cranks it up to 11 with live versions of their hits Manners and BLACK HOLE recorded at the Day Of The MAID concert back in May and posted 5 days ago. Enjoy!

ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION Once Again

It has been a while since I posted about ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, so it’s time to look at a few of their recent pieces. The first track is their new song Empathy, posted about a week ago on July 22nd and already pushing the 400K views mark. Since this year marks the bands 25th anniversary, the cross-generational message embedded in this video seems most appropriate. The next track is their classic hit Soranin, the version from THE FIRST TAKE project, posted on July 23rd, and already exceeding 1.5 million views. Not bad for under a week, but then it is a long time fan favorite recorded in a single take, with no do-overs. The third track was posted October of 2020 (nine months ago) and roughly translates as I want to touch I want to confirm, and sits at just over 500K views.

The last post I did for AKFG was in 2019, but like a third of the posts from that year and all but about 6 posts I did for 2020, it evaporated when I tried to migrate the site to the new servers. My best guess is the pandemic lockdown interfered with the hosting services on site backup processes for the 2020 entries, the way it has been doing with all aspects of everyone’s daily life since it slammed into us a year and a half ago (with no end in site as new infection rates once more skyrocket). But I did find several earlier entries survived just fine, if you want to check out a few more tracks out of the hundreds this excellent band has put together you can See Them Here.