The Japanese band Indigo la End is a bit hard to categorize; Alt, Rock, and Pop, they do it all. The first track is Images Do Not Appear On The Eyes from their first Warner Music single in 2014, the second is Nameless Happy Ending from their Space Shower Records days in 2013, the 3rd is Sweet Spider, also from the Space Shower era, circa 2012 or so. They have more recent tracks, but some of them are a bit overproduced, so I had to go with a few of the classics.
Released last week, Flumpool‘s new CD includes the theme song for the TV and Movie series Ajin: Demi-Human, Yoru Wa Nemurerukai? (Can You Sleep At Night?), which is the first track here. The Anime series itself just started airing in January, and runs for 13 episodes. This song was also the OP for the trilogy of movies of the same franchise; the first hit theaters in Japan in November, the second should be out roughly in May. According to Cruncyroll it will be streaming in North America on Netflix soon, but as of yesterday I wasn’t finding it.
The second track is their 2012 single Because… I am, and the third is Awakening Identity, which was posted online in April of 2015. I am not sure when it was actually released, as this was posted in support of their album The Best 2008-2014. The band also has a nice collection of ballads, but I tend to prefer music with a pulse, so I posted the ones I liked.
Japanese rock band Bump of Chicken have a new album coming out this Wednesday, February 10th, called Butterfly. The first song is the title track, the next is their 2014 hit Ray, and the third is Hello World, released as a single last April and now part of the new album. These tracks are a little more pop than I usually prefer; they started as Alt-Rock with some mainstream Rock tracks, but the songs that sold a lot of copies sounded like these, so their style has changed over the last few decades. But not every time; the tunes used in the Anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (the original series) and Blood Blockade Battlefront were excellent, so I had to include one of them here as well.
I usually leave music for Saturday’s entry, but this one is about 3D modeling and motion capturing to create an amazing video. When The Chemical Brothers and Beck got together to record Wide Open they decided they needed the dancer in the video to be wide open as well. So they made a 3D model of Sonoya Mizuno and used it to transform her gradually into a 3D printed matrix of herself. The result is as enjoyable on the eyes as the music is on the ears. Thanks to Digital Trends for the heads up on this one.
The name of the first track from Hysteric Lolita is Distress, their second single which is also off of their upcoming first album Not Equal which will be released on February 3rd. The second is Emotional Girl from their 2014 debut single Despair of the Spiral. I really wanted to post their brilliant new track Voice for Voice, but they haven’t released an official full length video of it yet. If you like their music you can buy it on iTunes, they have all 7 of the singles available now, or you can wait for February 3rd and get the entire 14 track album.
The group Band-Maid are 5 girls playing some excellent hard rock out of Japan while wearing terminally kawaii maid outfits. The first track is Real Existence from mid-2015, the second is Thrill, which was their first single from 2014. The final video almost looks like an audition session they did while looking for a new drummer, but the music is great even if the video is a bit linear.