Somehow I thought that something major was going to happen in J-Pop during my two weeks of honeymoon, and just in time for the last day before I have to go back to my day job, it did.

Erena Ono, a member of AKB48′s Team K (Megumi Ohori was one of her bandmates before she was moved to SDN48) that has been on all of their major single A-sides and one of my favorite members of the group, is graduating from the band soon, reportedly to pursue first educational activities and then more entertainment work outside of the AKB universe. No date has been given for her final show, as far as I can tell.

To say that this is a major shockwave in AKB48 fandom is an understatement, given that the 4’11″, soon-to-be-17-year-old is one of the band’s most beloved veteran members. It also doesn’t seem completely surprising, since she isn’t one of the members selected to represent the group on the cover of the Kami Kyokutachi album. Given that she’s been a prominent member of the group on all of their major label A-sides, this is a damn shame.

Hopefully, Erepyon’s time out of the spotlight will be brief and we’ll still get to hear her lend her pretty voice to songs like “FIRST KISS” from the Namida Surprise EP. The OPV below, done by a fan earlier this year, should prove to be a fitting tribute to her.

…except maybe for this one that could have been our first dance had Tara been more into J-Pop. Still, it’s also appropriate, so I’ll post it here (lyrics in both Japanese and English will open in a new window here):

See you all again here very soon… the honeymoon awaits. In the meantime, you can keep up with us here and here!

I usually don’t like to do capsule reviews. In my view, they tend to be written by lazy hack writers who only seem to skim through the promotional copies of CDs they obtain for review before piling them up in a box somewhere for them to sell off at a used CD store somewhere – if they bother to listen to them in the first place. But since I’ve been doing a whole lot of listening but no blog-related writing over the past few months – thanks in part to all of the preparations I’ve been going through for my wedding this Saturday – this particular format will have to do. After the honeymoon and once I’ve gotten settled in, I’ll go back to my regular reviewing style. This’ll be part one. Part two I’ll be completing and posting after the honeymoon.

AKB48 – Kami Kyokutachi (You! Be Cool/King) – While there’s a whole pile of albums out there with the AKB48 name on them, they’ve all been, with the exception of the Set List – Greatest Songs 2006-2007 compilation, basically “original cast albums” of all of the separate teams’ shows – lots of good songs and good singing, but nothing that could cohesively be called a studio album. Fortunately, although billed as a “best-of album”, Kami Kyokutachi comes off as close to a coherent studio album as the group has ever come. All of the band’s King A-sides plus their interim digital-only indie single “Baby! Baby! Baby!” get supplemented with a few random B-sides (no Undergirls/Theatre Girls material or Erena Ono’s beautiful solo cut “First Kiss” though) and some new tracks and make for the most cohesive – and long overdue – long-playing experience to be released under the AKB48. Now if they could put out a single A-side that is a hell of a lot more exciting than the last couple of singles they’ve released since the year started…
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars Available on CD/DVD combo and on iTunes Japan.

DEVO – Something for Everybody (Warner Bros.) – When it was first announced that Devo had gotten back together full-time, resigned to their original American record label Warner Bros., and started working on a new album, I saw a couple of skeptical tweets from people who wondered why anyone would want a new Devo album in the first place. Well, not only have Devo debunked Thomas Wolfe’s old yarn about not being able to go home again by returning to Warner Bros., they’ve also followed in the tradition of the Stooges, New York Dolls, Mission of Burma and Ace Frehley and handed in an album that was worth both the multi-decade wait (two decades, in the case of our beloved spudboys), but they’ve made their finest album since 1983’s Oh No! It’s Devo. Simply put, they’ve redeemed themselves after the debacle of their Enigma Records period and made an album that stands up as tall as their classic back catalog (most of which has been very nicely remastered and reissued by Warner Bros.). (Also, in my opinion, Warner Bros. should surprise the hell out of casual listeners and service the ballad “No Place Like Home” to radio.)
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars Available on CD, LP, and in three different iTunes/Amazon MP3 editions; this review is based on the highly-recommended 16-track deluxe edition.

HANK WILLIAMS III – Rebel Within (Sidewalk/Curb) – This is the last album Hank III is doing for Curb Records, and once it was announced earlier this year that he had completed the album and handed it in to the label, people wondered how much of an effort he’d put into it, given his open disgust with how the label handled his music. Given his intentions to continue as an independent artist for all future albums onward, III could not certainly squander his hard-earned fan base for the sake of kissing off his soon-to-be-former-label. Thus, Hank hands in a set of mostly country material closer to Lonesome Broke and Driftin’ than his seminal Straight to Hell, but changes gears in a few places with the title track’s touches of Assjack-style hollering in the chorus, the eerie “Karmageddon” with its lyrical allusions to the plight of Native Americans, and – the true highlight of the album – a raucous country/punk/metal hybrid in “Tore Up and Loud”, where III’s “Hellbilly” style gets kicked up several notches with personal lyrics, power-metal double-kick drumming (done by III himself – like “Punch Fight Fuck” on Damn Right Rebel Proud, anytime you hear Slayer-style drums behind country guitars, III’s sitting behind the kit), and Pantera-esque electric guitar riffing, culminating in a blatant, obvious, and long-overdue Declaration of Independence capped with a “Fuck all y’all” to the Curb Records staff. Fuck Curb, indeed – and a big “fuck, yeah” for Shelton Hank Williams.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars Available on CD, LP with bonus CD, and on iTunes and AmazonMP3.

Again, part two comes after the honeymoon… see you then! Until then, one can follow our exploits via Twitter.

However, I am not closing TGML or any of its related sites, or letting them stay static.

This week, I’ll be making a few special posts, and then when I get back from my honeymoon next week, I’ll be back at a more active schedule.

Thanks for your patience!

- CJ Marsicano

To a lot of people, it probably sounded promising but likely to fail. Three former Evanescence members hook up with a former American Idle contestant and make a song that sounds almost exactly like early Ev. Great tune, many said, but a whole album of this stuff?

The reality of the situation, as reflected not only in the wake of Evanescence’s second album (2006’s The Open Door [Wind-Up]) but in the end result of We Are The Fallen’s first album, speaks volumes. Without guitarist, songwriter and Ev co-founder Ben Moody involved, The Open Door was less of a follow-up to Evanescence’s first album Fallen and more of the debut of the Amy Lee Project. Talk in the Fallen days of diva-like behavior on Lee’s part intensified in 2007 when, without warning or reason and with a co-headlining spot on that summer’s Family Values Tour looming, Lee summarily fired guitarist and founding member John LeCompt. Ev’s drummer, Rocky Gray, quit in disgust in the wake of LeCompt’s seemingly uncalled for dismissal, joining his fellow ex-Ev in a project called Machina, which self-released a CD EP several months later.

Yes, We Are The Fallen’s Tear Down The World sounds remarkably like Evanescence did on Fallen. Then again, given that four of the people primarily responsible for that album’s sound (one-time Ev keyboardist David Hodges contributes to the album as a session keyboardist) are involved and in the same studio for the first time since the sessions for Fallen ended, it’s a no-brainer. Without a note or a song wasted, Tear Down The World proceeds to be the true follow-up to Evanescence’s Fallen. Amy Lee’s imitations of Tori Amos are long gone, allowing the Moody/LeCompt/Gray triumvirate and new bassist Marty O’Brien to get down to rocking. A few faster tempos are thrown in, Moody and/or LeCompt even throw in a couple of guitar solos (the CD’s liner notes don’t identify who is lead and who is rhythm) and, capping it all off, Carly Smithson provides a much more fully-bodied voice to fit the music, making Amy Lee’s own vocals seem weak in comparison.

Simply put, this is what The Open Door should have been like.

Five out of five stars.

Actually, I’m merely endorsing how good this album is. There’s no review I could write of this that could do as much justice as Vee’s review at her new site, Microphone Fiend. Go there. I’ll be back later with a few other reviews.

I almost forgot to post something today, but I have a good excuse: Today was also my fiancee’s bridal shower, and guess who had to schlep gifts back and forth in his car? Yep…

I should note that for the past few weeks I’ve been – on top of planning towards the wedding and subsequent move into mine and my wife-to-be’s new apartment – finishing up the novel (yeah, still… but then again if I didn’t have to hold a day job it would have been finished already), working on a screenplay for Script Frenzy, working on a couple of reviews for this blog (they’ll be up this week), and working on my guitar.

And last night, boy, did I work on my guitar… I got this thing (Epiphone Les Paul) a few months ago, but I never changed the strings until last night. Such was my Saturday night:

And to keep things J-pop related, here’s another part of what helped keep me sane, especially today:

Besides, I couldn’t figure how to equal or better the live MoMusu and Stooges clips from last year! But what I can do is (even though I didn’t get this finished until after midnight when the 11th became the 12th) update a list I posted two years ago on my second blogging anniversary at MotokoAoyama.com, which would make this “A List That Took Four Years To Make”:

Two webhosts (only one of which I recommend, Bluehost)
Four laptops (Don’t get me started…)
Two iPods (and I’m planning on finally upgrading soon… I have more music on my hard drive than can fit on my present 60GB model!)
Morning Musume and AKB48 both making their American concert debuts (come back here, both, er, ALL of you!!)
Thirteen Morning Musume singles
Eight personnel changes in Morning Musume
Two personnel changes in C-ute
No personnel changes in Berryz Koubou
More personnel changes in AKB48 than anyone can keep up with… (and don’t even get any serious AKB fan started on those team reassignments!)
Six and a half Morning Musume albums (the “half album” being the 7.5 Fuyu Fuyu EP)
Twelve Berryz Koubou singles (double the amount from two years ago!)
Three and a half Berryz Koubou studio albums (the “half album” being their misnumbered (3) Natsu Natsu Mini Berryz)
Eleven C-ute singles (all of their major-label releases)
Four and a half C-ute albums (I still consider ? mini ~Ikiru to Iu Chikara~ to be an EP)
Four Koda Kumi studio albums (I lost track of compilations and singles!)
Two Ayumi Hamasaki albums (Go ahead and yell at me, Vee…)
One and a half Maki Goto albums (That first one for Avex is pretty much an EP…)
One and a half SCANDAL albums (Again, the half-album is an EP…)
Three post-Whiteberry EPs from bands led by Yuki Maeda (One Yukki, two The Husky)
Seven Stooges albums (two of those being the remastered editions of their Elektra albums, another being a 180-gram pressing of Raw Power, and counting the forthcoming deluxe reissue of the original Bowie mix of Raw Power)
The entire Koharu Kusumi solo discography
The entire Buono! discography to date
The entire AKB48 singles discography to date
Five New York Dolls albums (three of those being vinyl editions of all three studio albums)
Seven Puffy AmiYumi albums
Five Mission of Burma albums (three of them being the new vinyl reissues on Matador)
Two Panic! At The Disco albums
Two Meat Puppets albums
Four Hank III albums (counting the Assjack album and his forthcoming The Rebel Within, of course)
Two copies of Flyleaf’s first album (one autographed)
Three autographed Sick Puppies CDs
One guitar autographed by Iggy Pop and the Asheton Brothers
One Asheton brother being transferred from the Stooges to Rock N’ Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band (I’m sure Ron is trading Mike Watt stories with D. Boon!)
James Williamson rejoining the Stooges
The Stooges finally making the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame (Next targets: The New York Dolls, Black Flag, and The Minutemen… and that’s a fucking vow and a promise from me!)
Lux Interior being transferred from the Cramps to Rock N’ Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band
A Sex Pistols reunion
A Public Image Ltd. reunion
Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols “mis-manager” dying of cancer… followed by Johnny Rotten NOT singing “Celebration” or “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” (good on ya, Johnny…)
Seven books autographed by Henry Rollins
One book autographed by Sen. Arlen Specter
Three e-mails from Henry Rollins
Two e-mails from Jello Biafra
Three day trips to New York where I spent over $700 combined in one store (Virgin Megastore) alone
Four visits to Apple Stores where I spent $0 (and wish I had been able to spend several times what I spent at Virgin)
Five day trips to Philadelphia
Two day trips to Syracuse, NY
One Stooges concert
One Bon Jovi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
Two Flyleaf concerts
Two Evanescence concerts
Two Sick Puppies concerts
Two 3 Doors Down concerts (Which makes four times I’ve seen my fiancee’s favorite band, versus zero times I’ve seen my favorite band… that’s gotta be corrected quick-fast)
Two opening sets prior to 3DD by Hinder (Most boring band not named Nickelback or Daughtry, by a long shot)
Two Breaking Benjamin concerts (and unfortunately, although they played well as always, the sound at the second sucked! What was up with that, Ben?)
One missed Puffy AmiYumi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
One missed Morning Musume concert (yes, that concert!!)
One missed Mike Watt & The Secondmen concert (sorry, Mike… still!!!)
Four 100-count spindles of CD-R’s
Two Palm Treo 680 smartphones
Three Blackberry smartphones (no, I’m not getting an iPhone)
Four SD cards
Three phonograph needles
Morning Musume CDs finally being released in the United States (the flipside… well, I’ll get to that soon enough…)
Nine WordPress themes
Seven domain names (on top of the previously mentioned ones, there’s TGML’s URL, the one for the Meetan blog, and a second one for the Reina blog)
Two different Reina Tanaka/Robert Fripp header graphics at MotokoAoyama.com (Vee improved on the original)
Ai Kago finally making a comeback
One W album that’s gone the way of the original version of SMiLE
One Guns N’ Roses album finally being finished, handed in, and released!
Ace Frehley beating his ex-bandmates to record stores with new material… and not having to sell out to Wal-Mart to do it!
Six Mike Watt-related albums recorded during this blog’s and its predecessor’s lifetime waiting mixdown or release
Two animes with Reina Tanaka doing voice work
Two knocked-up MoMusus
Two instances where I bitched about Nozomi Tsuji getting knocked up
Three instances where I remarked about what a lucky bastard Taiyo Sugiura is
Three snarky remarks made by me about Avril Lavgine
One snarky remark made by “Reina” about Jamie Lynn Spears
One snarky remark made by me to “Reina” about Beyonce Knowles
Countless snarky remarks about American Idle
More American Idle contestants losing their recording contracts
Five Reina Tanaka photobooks
One tire
Two illnesses
Two back-to-back NaNoWriMo wins
Three book projects (two simultaneous, one on hold)
One published short story (”The Man In The Hummer” in Deliver Us From Evil, available from Jaded Silence Press)
All four versions of American Wota
One nomination at the IntlWota Awards
Two jokes stolen from Jeff Dunham
One joke stolen from Nothing Nice To Say
Three times I got under the skin of Tony Brummel at Victory Records… that I know of. (Might as well make it four: How does it feel to lose Silverstein AND Bayside on top of Hawthorne Heights and Atreyu, baldy? I hear Aiden’s next…)
Five times my partner at My Sweet Meetan, Chris (CK) went to Japan
Reina Tanaka’s 18th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 19th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 20th birthday
My 40th birthday… I stopped counting after that.
Mike Watt’s 50th birthday… and counting
Iggy Pop’s 60th birthday… and counting – face it, he’s one unstoppable motherfucker, for which we should all be grateful.
Several boxes of CD sleeves
Countless mouse and camera batteries
Countless VitaminWaters
Countless instances where I took to heart David Peel’s adage that “fuck” is not a dirty word
A year and a half of lost blog archives (Don’t trust your webhosting to anyone who stage-names himself “Vikki Stixx”… or for that matter your real estate matters)
Not enough trips to Starbucks or Sonic (yeah, N.E. PA got one of those last summer!)
More money spent at CDJapan than at Gallery of Sound
Not as much money spent on vinyl since 2008, at least I don’t think so… but then again I’ve still taken that option whenever offered)
Virgin Megastore going out of business in 2009
Three Record Store Days (counting the forthcoming one this Saturday, which I’ll be honoring)
And one girlfriend, since upgraded to fiancée and soon to be upgraded to wife on 6.26.10

My fandom hasn’t changed very much. Reina is still on top for me, Takitty is right behind, but for whatever reason JunJun and LinLin have moved up in the ranks. Much of this ranking of individuals from #3 on down could change from day to day, though, so this is just what I was feeling tonight.

The group fandom was less hard to figure out. Morning Musume are still my favorite band, Buono! still rock, and I still like Berryz and C-ute even though I still can’t recognize some of the members on sight (obviously picking Miyabi, Momoko and Airi out thanks to their Buono! work isn’t hard, and I can recognize Risako and Chinami, but that’s about it at the moment) and C-ute’s new album hasn’t completely grabbed me yet like 10 My Me and We Are Buono! did.

I try never to let a day go by without playing some MoMusu music, no matter how many other musical mood swings I go through from day to day and week to week (In one example, for whatever reason, I went on quite the Minutemen/fIREHOSE jag the past week, as my last.fm page will attest). But, my listening habits have always been that way and that’s not likely to change, ever.

The bottom rows of both polls stayed the way they were from how Paul organized the default selections for a good reason: Erina Mano’s music hasn’t exactly grabbed me, and I’ve never listened to Guardians 4 or S/mileage so I can’t comment on them.

Other than that, I get married in 89 days (yikes – time’s flyin’!), which means that as that day looms forward I need my favorite band and their compatriots to keep me sane. That also means I have to cram in a lot of activity on here before then… and then cram in some more after the nuptials.

No, I can’t stand her. She’s a terrible singer and actress. Koda Kumi or anyone in Morning Musume (or any female in the Japanese pop scene, quite frankly) could eat her for breakfast and shit out the Pussycat Dolls. But in a Parade magazine interview that hitting newspaper inserts this weekend, apparently she has a few choice words about the genre her father helped ruin:

“It scares me, that’s why. It feels contrived on so many levels. Unless you’re wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and singing and whining about your girlfriend or boyfriend leaving you it’s not going to sell. I think that’s why my dad finally got out of it. You have to wear those cowboy boots and be sweet as pie. It makes me nervous, the politics of it all.”

Yeah, it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but in this case, the pot is right: Even though her weak attempts at what she passes off for pop music in this country aren’t exactly any better than the Carrie Underwoods, Rascal Flattses, and John Riches (and their umpteen clones) that Nashville has been passing off as “country” music since her father dropped that achy-breaky one-hit wonder on America’s heads, she hit the nail on the head with an unerring eye. What started out as the unintended invention (for all intents and purposes) of Hank Williams Sr. and Jimmy Rodgers, what used to be the province of distinctive outlaws like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Kris Kristofferson has become an assembly-line genre dominated by a select clique of writers, producers, and session musicians backing a series of interchangeable clones.

It’s not Garth Brooks that should be faulted, although some people like to use him as a convenient whipping boy. Garth Brooks came in as an artist who grew up on both Kiss and George Strait and turned a genre weakened by the Urban Cowboy fad back around. It was the “parade of horribles”, to borrow a Circle Jerks song title, who didn’t give a fuck about the accomplishments of Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, or Buck Owens but saw a way to make a quick buck that infected Nashville. Look up the lyrics to Alan Jackson’s song “Gone Country” and you’ll see a decent idea of what went wrong. Is it any wonder why Garth stopped recording and performing, why Terri Clark walked out on her BNA/Sony-BMG contract and started putting out her own records, why the Dixie Chicks told the country establishment to fuck off and hooked up with Rick Rubin?

Ask Hank Williams III how wonderful Nashville is, or at least listen to or read the lyrics of his songs “Trashville”, “Dick in Dixie”, and “The Grand Old Opry (Ain’t So Grand Anymore)” sometime. There’s your answer.

Not surprisingly, Country Music Television’s blog, playing Fox News to the pop-country establishment’s Republican Party (i.e. acting as an echo chamber/propaganda unit), is seeing fit to defend the current Music Row tripe. Their opinion doesn’t matter – this same blog also praised the idea of record stores going out of business after Sugarland signed with Wal-Mart to have an exclusive right to distribute their next album. Perhaps the author of that CMT blog piece should go visit a real record store – especially on Record Store Day this forthcoming 4.17.10 – and see what real people are buying!

I’m not going to hold my breath and wait to see if Miley has an even bigger epiphany, takes a year off from the public eye to disappears somewhere with a guitar and some Stooges and Minutemen albums, and turns up on some indie label somewhere after letting her Hollywood Records contract lapse. But the mere fact that a super-corporate pop act made such a critical comment speaks volumes – even if she doesn’t follow it up by putting Fun House and Double Nickels on the Dime in her iPod!

The Replacements Alex Chilton