Wake Up! is an amazing collaboration between Asian Kung-Fu Generation and Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, two of my favorite bands out of Japan. The track after that has Mongol.800 as the featured band/vocalist playing with them, and after that comes one featuring 10-Feet as their musical partner. Let’s face it, Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra has been around forever, and they have created some world-class collaborations in that time. Enjoy!
Three things come to mind when I hear the word Supergirl these days; one TV show, and two variations on the same song. The new iteration on the Supergirl TV show from CBS looks kick ass, as you can tell from the first video. Kara Zor-El looks to be in full control, except for when she isn’t. They certainly don’t need any encouragement from me, but how can I keep quiet when they are setting up for such an amazing start?
When we drop into the music, I have loved the Reamonn song for a few decades now, definitely one of my favorites. If you don’t know them, Reamonn was a German pop rock band headed up by Irishman Rea Garvey. His hit off the first album was Supergirl, which made the top 10 in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. For the most part, people in North America (or much of anywhere else outside of central Europe centered on Germany) only heard the track as an import, and it didn’t receive much air play. But it should have; it was amazing!
Just recently it has been covered and re-released by Anna Naklab featuring Alle Farben & YOUNOTUS. This version is every bit as intense as the original; enjoy them all! Alle Farben, Anna Naklab, and You Not Us are all German artists, singing this world-class song in English. Which is pretty much how it started off, after all.
This time Movies have Ex Machina, a cybernetic tale of the birth of AI as haunting as it is thought provoking. While not as relentlessly kill crazy as the Terminator series, you do get a glimpse into the birth of that attitude among the biologically challenged, and the kind of events that might provoke it. X-Men: Days of Future Past: the Rogue Cut started with 17 minutes of additional footage we have never seen before. Some of the new footage centers around Paquin’s Rogue, who I don’t feel we saw enough of in the theatrical version. In order to make the story line changes the new scenes bring to the film work they also have modified some of the original footage with either re-edits or alternate takes. The end result is as much of a different movie as some of the Blade Runner remakes, so it will probably have to follow me home. The 1959 French classic Hiroshima, Mon Amour is being re-released on Blue Ray off of a 4K master for the first time ever this week. No, it isn’t genre, but it was one of those films that changed the way people made movies from that point on, the way Indiana Jones did. This is one of those films you need to see at least one time in your life, or you will have missed something amazing and paradigm changing.
I didn’t find any TV entries this week, but there is one contender in a much older episodic story telling tradition. Beowulf is performed in the original Bardic style by Benjamin Bagby, Anglo-Saxon harp in hand and voice in full throat, singing in Old English. He has given this performance at the Smithsonian and at Carnegie Hall, to name a few. This is as close as most of us can ever hope to get to experiencing one of the tales that shaped our last few thousand years on Earth the way it was meant to be heard.
In Anime, Familiar of Zero: F is Season 4 of the series; ever since she first accidentally kidnapped him from Earth (yep, she did that by accident; she is just a tad clueless about how to get her magic to work), their relationship has been growing. But so has the list of powerful beings trying to take them out… permanently. In Recently, my sister is unusual Mitsuki is trying to adjust to her new life and brother, when an amnesiac ghost girl needs her help to pass on to the next world.
Is the Order a Rabbit? is a very kawaii show involving a cafe, a mysterious rabbit, one heavily armed girl, and some possible telepaths. One Piece is releasing both Collection 13 with Episodes 300 through 324 and One Piece: Season 7 Voyage 1 with episodes 385 through 396. I find it interesting that the one with 24 episodes is $2 cheaper than the one with 11 episodes, probably because it is about a year older.
From the band Cocoro Auction comes the song Outburst of Crickets Chirping, which is pretty much a coming of age movie compressed into a few moments and given a light, J-Pop soundtrack. The next song is Summer of Phantom, a variation on the same theme, and equally worth watching/listening to. The final track gives us their 2012 release Nazonokusa, back when they were more rock and less pop.
As a general rule, I am not in favor of having government agencies in control of music. One exception to that (there are others) is the series VOAs Beyond Category. In this presentation, we get to listen to the Jazz of John Pizzarelli, and learn a bit more about him and his musical heritage. The series has some of the most amazing Jazz and Blues artists playing today, and for once I am quite happy to have my tax dollars going to a project. Don’t stop at just one; explore the depth and range of this Voice of America show, they have a lot to offer.
The band Unison Square Garden is from Japan, and they have been cranking out the rock for a while. The first track here is from their 5th Album “Catcher In The Spy”, called Heaven and Hell, released in 2014.
The second track came out about 5 weeks ago, and is the short version of Sugar Song and Bitter Step, Short Version in Japan apparently meaning they will give you one verse, and if they are feeling generous half a chorus. This isn’t the first time I have posted an official short version Japanese song on this site, for Anime OP or ED tracks are usually 90 seconds long, and worth every moment of it. And since it turns out this song IS an Anime ED track, specifically for the Anime Blood Blockade Battlefront, track 2.5 is the Anime version of it. Which also could explain why such a kick ass Rock band recorded such a Pop tune; they needed to land that Anime contract to get the word out about the majority of their body of work. At least, I hope that was their justification, and they didn’t just go belly-up into full-tilt Pop on us.
For the third track we jumped all the way back to the live version of their 2012 song Out Of Place Hummingbird. As always, the actual song titles are the best guesses of a guy with a very limited vocabulary in that language, but the music needs no translation, it is just that good.