If you don’t already know who the band One OK Rock is, you have a wide range of music to explore and enjoy as you find out. They are doing an extensive tour of the US in the next several months, including the Warped Tour across much of the continent. Out of the small handful of tracks I am sharing today, the first one is called Clock Strikes from their 6th album in March of 2013, the second is No Scared, and the 3rd is Deeper, Deeper. That gives you 3 examples out of 3 dozen; this selection of tracks is just the tip off the iceberg, as the saying goes. The lead singer is Taka, and he is amazing. Enjoy!
DOLL＄BOXX is a five to seven woman rock band from Japan (some members seem to be there intermittently as other projects draw them away), formed when the band Gacharic Spin joined forces with Fuki, the lead singer from Lightbringer. Both bands continue to record and tour separately, and both are very good, but I really like the music they created together. The first track is their song Take My Chance from 2012, the second is 2013’s Ｍｅｒｒｉｌｙ Ｈｉｇｈ Ｇｏ Ｒｏｕｎｄ.
To everyone who did make it this year, from all of us who wish we were there: Happy Mardi Gras, New Orleans! Hope you get the Baby in your King Cake! And nothing really says Mardi Gras quite so much as a song or three from Professor Longhair; enjoy.
It is the end of the school year and time for graduation in Japan, a theme reflected in the latest video from Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. The track is called Yume no Hajima Ring Ring, and is being released today; if her past releases are any indication, you should be able to pick it up on iTunes if you live in North America. And if you do live in North America, she is on a world tour at the moment, and will be playing in New York, Toronto, and Chicago in March.
This week, a few tracks from the band Handsome Ken’ya (Sugimoto Kousuke), a less than subtle Japanese group/person. The first piece is Inferiority Beat, the next I Sing In My Own Way, also called I Sing So Much. Then we get Decision Speed, and finally Full Moon Party rounds out the set, a very tasty guitar riff instrumental.
The first video by Qooland is called Sea Lice And Bear, more or less. It was posted 3 weeks ago, and is from their upcoming 6-song EP being released on February 12th, called something like Tear Your Classroom To Pieces. Sea Lice is the 5th track on the new EP, while Bear is the 6th, they did a nice job of melding them together. The second track came out almost a year ago on their full album Telecaster so you’ll still play. I have to point out these are my own interpretation’s of the Google Translate results, I don’t read Japanese yet, and still only have between 50 and 100 words of spoken vocabulary, so I have to interpolate a lot. The music is fun, though, and you get some interesting related j-rock results when you plug the band name in over at Last FM.