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…
20. The Brixton Academy “Two Shadows United” The Brixton Academy have always played the role of overly earnest nightclub crawlers, guys who love evenings out on the town but also aren’t good at bottling up all those icky emotions, prone to letting them shoot out like just-uncorked champagne. Whereas Kido Yoji distracts from his ennui…
30. Michiyo Honda “Paradise Lost” J-Pop remains an easy punching bag in 2011 because most of the criticism lobbed at Japanese mainstream music ring true. A large chunk of acts crowding the upper reaches of the Oricon chart are 90’s holdovers with appropriately bland tunes. Labels seem to be in an arms race to see…
As the year draws to a close, so does Michiyo Honda’s “single a month” project, wherein she released a new single each month (all of which can be had on iTunes). It was a great little experiment responsible for a lot of great music – the light electro-pop of “Just 200 Years In Prison,” the…
One of the more straightforward numbers to come out of Michiyo Honda’s 2011 monthly singles project, “Sorry” bounces ahead on a club-ready beat and slightly affected vocals. She works in a fair amount of glitchy touches – check the way things just sort of come in and out of this song almost randomly – but…