More from the department of “stuff I missed while on vacation”…Michiyo Honda capped of a very busy year with one more single, titled “It’s Me!!!” She opted to end 2011 on a pretty bouncy note, as “It’s Me” is Erasure-inspired electro-pop highlighted by a bubbly chorus that is the poppiest thing she wrote in the…
In news that was inevitable, fuzzy beach-pop group Friends changed their name. From now on they will be known as Teen Runnings, which I like to imagine came about because the band watched Cool Runnings and thought “teen” was a synonym for “cool.” Anyway, this had to happen because Brooklyn group Friends, responsible for this…
Only a few days into 2012 and already we have a great release on the board. CUZ ME PAIN artist Nites, which is the alter ego of recent Captured Tracks signing Jesse Ruins, dropped a free EP onto Bandcamp today. Carcass Of The Sun collects a couple of older Nites tunes alongside what appear to…
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1-cnmcic8s”] Make Believe Melodies just spent five days in Washington D.C., watching a bunch of college football, drinking fancy beers and gorging on Swedish meatballs. The unfortunate side effect of this trip…besides a sudden ballooning of my stomach…was a lack of Internet that meant missing out on new Japanese music, most prominently this new song…
Regardless of what claims borderline-nationalist J-Pop fans squawked out, Korean pop artists locked themselves into the Japanese pop-culture landscape this year, going from foreign curio to accepted face on the music charts. Girls’ Generation and KARA started releasing Japan-only songs and albums, releases which did very very very well. K-Pop boy bands started hitting the…