Acapella Science has put together a great little song giving you the history of Exoplanets, from its beginnings back in 1990 to the present, culminating with the TRAPPIST-1 discovery. You have to appreciate him when he says I’m a harmony addict working on a master’s in theoretical physics; what ELSE was I going to make a YouTube channel about? This is his latest, but far from his only such production; he tries to crank one of these out each week. So I thought I would include a few more, with Entropic Time for the second tune, and the final one is CRISPR-Cas9 (Bring Me A Gene). I don’t usually include videos with a stinger at the end hyping the person’s channel, but this isn’t just music, it is science at the same time, and that is a combination worth supporting. The man creating these is Tim Blais, and I hope he keeps making these for a long time to come.
OKAMOTO’S formed in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan in 2006, and got their major record label deal in 2010, when they signed with Ariola Records Japan, an affiliate of Sony Music Entertainment. Everybody in the band is a fan of world renowned artist TarÅ Okamoto, so when they chose stage names they all went with his last name. Their music is kind of acid garage band, with a lot of energy. The first track is the Google Translate version of their hit Lagoon posted about 4 weeks ago, the second is 2015’s Waratte Waratte, and the third is Sing A Song Together, also from 2015. If they sound familiar it might be because their debut hit single Shout Out Your Desires was the 18th ending theme of Naruto: Shippuden.
There are some new songs from Fukuoka prefecture art-rock band PolkadotStingray (yes, it really is one word run together), the first one here is ELECTRIC PUBLIC posted last Sunday and rapidly approaching half a million view in just 6 days. That is the opening song of their 1st Mini Album Great Justice, which will be released on April 26th. The next track is the mermaid from their first E.P. release last year, Boneless E. P., and I almost put a pretty interesting Google Android commercial they did for an app that would let you search for photos of yourself. The song on that one is great, but I can’t see posting a commercial.
Hello Sleepwalkers has a new mini-album that came out this week, and the first track is the song Sundown from that release. After that is Rollin and New World, also both from the new release. They have another recent mini-album called Unplugged Demos full of acoustic tracks, but I couldn’t find any of them that had permission set to stream in North America.
Tessa Violet gives us her take on gaining skill sets that have a serious learning curve, in this case the Japanese language. The bottom line is recognizing when your performance at a given task isn’t the performance at all, but just the practice you need to graduate to the next learning plateau. After that, a cover of one of the songs by the band she is currently being the warm up act for on her first tour of England.
I have been ranting about how good ONE OK ROCK is since 2011, and they have gotten nothing but better since then. I finally had the chance to see them live on October 6th, 2015, in a tiny little club in a major East Coast city, and unlike most bands I have heard they sounded even better live and in person than they did in the studio recordings. That was the same tour when everyone in the US became aware of them, so I don’t need to rant any more, or even speak, really. Here are two of their best recent tracks, American Girls (pretty much the opposite of Guess Who’s American Woman) posted on February 1st, and We Are posted on January 6th.