The weird and the wonderful

For those of you who have forgotten (and if so, shame on you), Art By Numbers released their debut album, Reticence: The Musical, on 29th May. It's a really catchy album which would be a great gateway for people trying to get into prog metal and even metal in general, but still manages to stand tall in terms of technical skills and writing. They decided to mostly drop the screamo from their Reyes and Minotaur days (those songs make a comeback in non-screamo versions, by the way), which is not necessarily bad, but just different. I've listened through the album about 4 times already and I'm still trying to decide on my favourite song of the album, so instead of giving any recommendations I'll just link directly to their full album stream and you can decide on your own.

Now that we're done with the wonderful, it's time to talk about that other thing. And if you think that I'm being judgmental by calling out a whole other genre of music as "weird", then I assure that what you're about to see and hear is objectionably weird. Say hello to BabyMetal:





It's kawaii-style J-pop... With death metal... I'm not sure if I need to say anything else. But all things said and done, "weird" does not necessarily exclude "good", and I can't say that I outright don't like this music; the metal parts are decent enough, and the J-pop parts are bearable. But then you get to actually watching the music videos, with the 3 girls acting sickeningly cute enough to give anyone diabetes against a backdrop of blast beats and guitar riffs, and I find myself getting goosebumps every time I force myself to sit through them. I'd hate to jump on the "WTF Japan" bandwagon, but seriously can you blame me in this case?