There is a new track this week from the band SecondWall called Word, and it is every bit as good as you would expect. It looked lonely on the page by itself, so I am also reposting one of theit older songs, At the end of love, the cherry blossom dances. The band has been together since 2009 and got their major record deal in 2013, and seems to get better every year. Enjoy!
The Kobe band Fredrick has another opening to a popular Anime, Koi to Uso, in English: Love And Lies, a story of future Japan where the government selects your life partner with an eye to increasing the dwindling population. I haven’t seen the show yet, because I don’t have a subscription to the only streaming service I have found it on. But I do enjoy what they have done for the opening theme, Sad and Happy, the first track presented here. It was posted July 31st, and has well over 2 million views so far, and was released on their August 16th single. The other track is a live version of their song Only Wonder, recorded at Studio Coast 2017, and also part of their 2nd single. Japanese singles are a bit different than the ones in North America; this one has a total of 5 live tracks and 3 studio recordings.
Shishido Kavka is the stage name of Shishido Yūna, a great singer who plays her own drums. She started off in the band The News, but broke out and released her first solo album in 2012, with her most recent offering being an EP released this past February. She was born in Mexico and was taught to play the drums by by Daniel “Pipi” Piazzoll (drummer, and grandson of Astor Piazzolla, a famous Tango musician some years back) in Argentina. The first track here is actually two songs, Miss Me and My, while the second is the short (only about half the song) version of Rock And Roll Widow.
The actress Cara Delevingne sings the song I Feel Everything from the Luc Besson masterpiece Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Sadly we probably won’t be getting anything additional from that comic book universe any time soon, because the movie cost around $150,000,000 to make, but they only pulled in just over $115,000,000 in its 4 week run. If you were one of the luck few who got to see it (they put it in the tiniest theater in each of the various megaplexes with a low number of screenings, while Dunkirk had half the screens, including 100% of all IMAX showings, and started every 45 minutes) you know what how good it was. They should get funding for the second one in about 25 years, when this film is a Cult Classic.
This is my first round of Random Acts of Tunage in quite a while, and while most of you will recognize most of these, another listen might have snuck past you to make the collection interesting. The first track is Lights doing the song Skydiving, and the second is The Regrettes with their killer song “Seashore”, both of which had me sitting up and taking notice. Be aware the second track is of the NSFW variety, but quite tasty.
The latest Daoko song, just posted today, is called Big Fireworks, and is the theme song for the new animated motion picture Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the Bottom?. The film opens in Japan on the 18th of this month, and is a remake of a 1993 live action drama of the same name. This one is a slice of life Anime with a side order of time travel, I can’t wait to see it! The animation work itself looks excellent, I hope they don’t wait a whole year before bringing it to the big screen in North America. Oh, yeah, the last trak is Daoko’s Good bye Goodbye from the J-WAVE SONAR MUSIC SPECIAL SHOW CASE about 3 months ago.