TomoLust

I love my god, I love my god! IGH! Let's go ride a quad with my god IGH!

How do you do, fellow kids?

Okay y'all, fixed the tracklist to feel more like an actual cohesive album (especially like their first two) and it's far more palatable like this.

Okay yeah, final thoughts: I agree with the "the good shit is GREAT, and the bad shit is BAAAAAAAAD" remark. The problem is that the bad stuff find its way into almost every song. Elevator Girl for instance is harmonically incredible, the lyrics however are truly awful. In The Name Of feels...useless. Babymetal Death as a song is similar in almost every way but one; it's a mostly instrumental cut with some random dude growling, it's heavy and kind of fun, but Babymetal Death was an intro song. This is just...in the middle of the album for no fucking reason. It feels as useless if not more-so than that dogshit "song" with Slowthai on the new Brockhampton album. It's just there to be there, and I don't give a shit about the random guy singing it. I'm here for Babymetal, not Random Guy. Again, as an intro, it works. As a weird interlude, it doesn't. Kagerou, Starlight, and Shine are the only truly flawless songs on here in my eyes, at least for what the album is. I think so long as they're a duo but still treat Moa as lesser, they'll always be flawed. But I digress, Kagerou, Starlight, and Shine feel like the only songs on here that aren't pandering to the west, as if they were written before they started marketing themselves as hard as they've been. They melodically sound like that unique "Babymetal" sound they came up on. A lot of these other songs are bloated down by useless features, awwwwwwwwfffffuuuuullllll English lyrics (pandering), and otherwise just hooks that are neither catchy nor in their style. BxMxC is a really great song too, but it's held down by the part where the instrumental cuts out and the cheap synth work; it sounds like they wanted to emulate the Mad Capsule Markets again without actually paying Ueda this time, but completely missing the fundamental harmonic structure and quality synth work that makes some of his best produced songs like STUPiG so special. Like I said, every song besides those that's good has a bad part. Da Da Dance just sounds like them going for Uki Uki Midnight or Iine 2. Future Metal's spoken word intro is embarrassing as hell despite the last half after Suzuka shuts the fuck up being really cool. Elevator Girl again has those awful English lyrics, Night Night Burn has them literally yelling "MAMA MIA!". For others like Pa Pa Ya or Oh MAJINAI, it's just the whole thing that's bad and there's no saving it. The tracklist is overall bloated down by worthless cuts like Pa Pa Ya, Oh MAJINAI, In The Name Of, and the new Distortion. On the topic of surface-level horny westerner-marketed Japanese girl metal, I think Band-Maid is gonna end up with the better album this year. It seems like Band-Maid has only gotten better with each album while Babymetal have only gotten weaker with each one. idk, I think if you cut the fat out, you've got another great album, but there's just no ignoring the flaws. Strong 4 to a light 5/10. Wake me up when Pour Lui pioneers another sub-genre.

Okay yeah, after my first listen, my sentiment from the preview post remains truer than before. This is a fucking mess with some potential for great moments ruined by a complete lack of self-awareness and cohesive direction. Amuse Inc. remain the worst agency in Japan. Feeling a light 5/10, because it's a straight split of half good/half awful. It's weird how the tables have flipped, like I'm at a point where like Rob Zombie or some shit is gonna clown me for talking shit about Babymetal despite the fact that I've been a Babymetal fan and defending them since 2013 and despite the fact that I just wanna see them succeed, but Amuse Inc. is continuously unintentionally sabotaging them.

I mean, Elevator Girl is a mostly English song anyway tho. It's musically and melodically good but yeah, the lyrics are just...god awful

Here, I'll let you be the winner of this one. Just reply to this one and I won't reply and you'll win. Go for it!

He's still talking about you too, doofus.

Oh this is gonna be a rough fucking ride... Also y'all, Babymetal barely even qualifies as weeb music at this point. Y'all wanna dig deep into the rabbit hole, hmu

Know not, you do. Waste time debating/go in circles with people who already have their mind made up, you don't. Points weak and irrelevant af tbh lol, they were.

You didn't counter any of my points, so...I win. Bye, daddy.

Actually, he's just black. Unashamedly. He's just not sugar-coating his blackness so he can sell you a record or a personality. Never heard Big Fish Theory tho, huh? Because that takes a lot more risks and says a lot more than TPAB does. What did TPAB do uniquely...jazz? Nujabes was revolutionizing jazz-rap like a decade before TPAB dropped. It's a great album, but it's nothing "revolutionary" as far as it goes, musically. Lyrically? Maybe, but it still doesn't hold a candle to GKMC as far as K-Dot's discography goes. You're white, we get it. Everybody wanna be hood until they in the hood. Also, my name isn't Tommy, Jim. Stop exuding pedophile energy.

Okay fine, the album is alright. Still think it's their weakest, but still has a worthy place in their discography.

Vince did more on BagBak alone than Kendrick did with the entirety of DAMN. but you don't know nothing about that. Kendrick sugar coats it so white folks can buy it. Vince tells it how it is. Vince and Noname the two best rappers alive, on god.

You...never heard Vince Staples?

That's actually a really good way of putting it. Love too gatekeep

Yeah, that one is alright too. Getting a little more enjoyment out of this now that the tracklist is right. I knew they weren't that dumb, something felt off. It's still...easily their weakest album tho. Feels like they're just making music to make music now, out of obligation, rather than to make a statement. OTIP and RW felt like fucking statements, like "we're here, we're taking over" type shit. This and After The Party just feels like obligation to make circlejerky "we're getting older and we still have the same interests our high school selves had" crap.

Oof, did not notice this on my first too listens. Probably not gonna change much, I've heard all the songs now and still only liked about 4 of them, but maybe the right tracklist will be a tiny bit better.

Okay yeah, London Drugs is the only good Greg song here, Tom's songs are great. This is essentially a Greg solo album.

That's...such a dogshit idea. Is Greg just losing self-awareness or pulling a Brian Fallon and trying to take total control? Because he's clearly not aware that his songwriting has gotten really stale. I'm on High School Friend now and this album really is worse than I could have ever expected. It's literally just ballads, really uninteresting ballads with really generic chord progressions, a lack of any dynamic in the songwriting, super boring hooks, and corny as hell lyrics. These guys used to be fucking poets. If I wanted to listen to music to crywank to, I'd listen to the albums Drake put out before he got buff.

Relieving to know that there are gonna be Tom songs on here, I was worried he wasn't gonna get anything at all because of all the singles being Greg. Tom is my last bastion of hope for this album to be anything resembling enjoyable. Damn, pleasant surprise Farewell Youth is a song with actually good songwriting. Can't say that about any of the singles, but this song is actually pretty okay.

I've been with these guys long enough to see them put out three game-changing albums and one pretty good album, only to see them drop some really lackluster singles the last year or two. Fully prepared to indulge in what has shaped up to be their blandest album to date. Let's get it. Still think one of the worst things any band can do is release the first several songs of an album as the singles. It doesn't feel like you're listening to a new album when the album comes out, it feels like a pressure to skip to song 3 here (or in Weezer's case earlier this year, song 5).

This is gonna be a total mess tbh. Babymetal have been a walking PR nightmare for the last year or two, and it's not even the girls' faults. Amuse Inc. is the most incompetent agency in Japan save for WACK if you could even consider them a real agency. They try to appeal to the western market by bloating this with features by (mostly) western metal artists, they try to act like they're a "real" and genuine metal "band" but manage to fuck that up by still being treated like idols and still pulling the kind of bullshit idols can get away with domestically. I personally am surprised it didn't happen sooner as shady graduations are just an ultra standard thing for idol groups, but there are still western fans who won't shut the fuck up about Yui leaving. They're even going as far as to avoid really good PR moves to try and fix their image, as well as changing up the group's formula in light of the lineup change. If anything, they should have changed the way the group functions; I actually feel bad for Moa at this point for still being treated as a lesser role, only now she has to do it alone. What they should have done is give her an equal role to Su, both vocally and in the choreography - put her and Su side by side and have them both take equal roles in the lead vocals. Instead, Moa is still pushed behind Su singing backup vocals rather than doing something new and exciting. And since they're not doing that, it's still a major blow for them to miss the fantastic PR opportunity of saying "Hey by the way, Riho Sayashi from fucking Momusu is our newest member". Anything about that tho? Nope, just as silent as they were when they kicked Yui out for being sexually active or possibly even pregnant, probably. Granted, there's no official reason but that's a super educated guess that's not even close to being unheard of in the industry. Everything surrounding this album is a fucking shitshow. "But what if the music is good, why does that matter?" Because ethics matter, because mistreatment and mismanagement is a major problem in the idol industry, and Babymetal doesn't even do a single thing to even try to veil that or step up and be an actual band no matter how hard they try to convince people that they are the latter. "But the music is good so it doesn't matter!". If that was any excuse, Kanye's albums would have fared much better last year, and people wouldn't be as riled up as they are about everything surrounding Jesus Is King right now. That argument is worthless. Yeah, Elevator Girl is a great song. But that doesn't change the fact that there's so much wrong about what they're doing, and it also doesn't change the fact that Papaya is fucking awful. Let me know when OG Pour Lui and Hirano Nozomi BiS is actually back. Then I'll care about idols again.

Saw their name come up on here and got so excited and then saw it was just a remix album, still waiting on the real new album. Should be out soon, they dropped a single earlier this year and have been playing tons of new songs live.