Re: 6th Station ~Other Bands for H!P Fans~
Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2015 2:01 pm
I like to collect physical CDs, DVDs, etc., and I like to bargain-hunt and to dig stuff up from the pop-culture past, so when I discovered Book-Off and a few other places in the L.A. area where I could buy older Jpop at dirt-cheap prices, I went into collector's mode and started grabbing anything that was cheap and looked interesting. That was around the time that I also started to pick up any Mando- and Cantopop that looked interesting on the discount shelves at local hole-in-the-wall stores (and now I find a lot of it in thrift shops).
So I spent a lot of time building up a good collection of Wink, Princess Princess, older H!P, China Dolls, Tarcy Su, etc., and filling in my ZONE collection. I also kept up with the post-ZONE Runtime acts (MARIA, Nagase Miyu's solo releases, the short-lived ZONE reunion), and with a few other current artists, like Huang Fei and A-Mei. I bought a lot of Runtime, Huang Fei, older Tarcy, and current Kpop online, either used through Amazon and eBay stores, or new from CDJapan and YesAsia. But I also lost a lot of interest in contemporary Jpop during that time.
In the past year or two, though, I've found myself getting more interested in current Jpop, largely because the new wave of indie/rock-based/even-sort-of-semi-underground-if-you-don't-look-too-closely idol groups, as well as the big-name acts with a fresh approach, such as Babymetal and Ebichu. Idol music has basically become an adventure again, which I like.
And things have changed enough so that I find that my current favorite resource for finding new and interesting groups is the General Idol news/culture/talk thread at H!O, which at this point has turned into a remarkable collection of the Good, the Bad, and the WTF. I've been listening to a mix of groups from that thread, combined with BiS spinoffs and Ebichu, and to me, it's as fresh and exciting as the stuff that I was discovering around 2003-2004 (which was probably the last time when everything did still seem to be a fresh discovery to me).
Which means, of course, that I'm getting enthusiastic about groups like under beAsty:
And Oyasumi Hologram:
as well as nice, fun, accessible pop like QAM:
But for me, that's just about the right kind of mix.
(And really, all three of those PVs are fun, accessible pop -- it's just that the first two make a good attempt at appearing to be something else. )
So I spent a lot of time building up a good collection of Wink, Princess Princess, older H!P, China Dolls, Tarcy Su, etc., and filling in my ZONE collection. I also kept up with the post-ZONE Runtime acts (MARIA, Nagase Miyu's solo releases, the short-lived ZONE reunion), and with a few other current artists, like Huang Fei and A-Mei. I bought a lot of Runtime, Huang Fei, older Tarcy, and current Kpop online, either used through Amazon and eBay stores, or new from CDJapan and YesAsia. But I also lost a lot of interest in contemporary Jpop during that time.
In the past year or two, though, I've found myself getting more interested in current Jpop, largely because the new wave of indie/rock-based/even-sort-of-semi-underground-if-you-don't-look-too-closely idol groups, as well as the big-name acts with a fresh approach, such as Babymetal and Ebichu. Idol music has basically become an adventure again, which I like.
And things have changed enough so that I find that my current favorite resource for finding new and interesting groups is the General Idol news/culture/talk thread at H!O, which at this point has turned into a remarkable collection of the Good, the Bad, and the WTF. I've been listening to a mix of groups from that thread, combined with BiS spinoffs and Ebichu, and to me, it's as fresh and exciting as the stuff that I was discovering around 2003-2004 (which was probably the last time when everything did still seem to be a fresh discovery to me).
Which means, of course, that I'm getting enthusiastic about groups like under beAsty:
And Oyasumi Hologram:
as well as nice, fun, accessible pop like QAM:
But for me, that's just about the right kind of mix.
(And really, all three of those PVs are fun, accessible pop -- it's just that the first two make a good attempt at appearing to be something else. )
Spoiler: show