Tonight I came across another great song by Castlebeat, Cinema. Another great music video by the Spirit Goth channel.
Book Off in Phoenix, AZ brings a Japanese shopping experience to Arizonans
On my trip to my hometown of Phoenix, AZ during my summer vacation, I was able to visit a Book Off on Bell Road! It opened within recent years. There have been Book Off stores all along in California. When Mayu and I used to live in America, we would visit the Book Off locations in Torrance, Garden Grove, Los Angeles and other areas. But now both Book Off and Daiso stores have opened in the Phoenix area.
Here are the signs outside.
Look at all the books! The books are in English, of course. Otherwise, the experience is just like a Book Off in Japan. This makes Book Off a direct competitor with the long-standing Bookmans store locations in Arizona.
The store clerk says that so much of this stuff is imported from the Book Off locations in Japan. I guess they buy so much stuff that they just export it to the USA for sale there.
So many anime figures for sale in the display case.
So many pin buttons, keychains, and small figures. Just like a Book Off in Japan.
They have import Famicom games from Japan! Star Wars, Red Arima, Parodius, Galaga… neat stuff!
Import Famicom and Super Famicom games too.
Domestically-released modern games are sold used there as well, of course.
This is the Grave of the Fireflies movie soundtrack on vinyl record. I was surprised to find this.
Huge selection of used, English-language manga. I bought several used volumes of Spy Family.
Gunpla! There were also other model kits there too. I even saw an Eggplane Girl resin figure by Hasegawa there, and for a good price. This is so cool.
Dollar books. Very neat. I didn’t have time to look at the SF book selection there. It would’ve been nice if I had more time to spend, but I had quite a busy itinerary with my friends Kevin and Brian. (Our next destination was Andy’s Hobby HQ which I featured in my previous blog post.)
I’ve fallen in love with Castlebeat
It’s cool how YouTube can, out of the blue, recommend music I’ve never heard of before and when I click to listen, I become completely enamored with it. I’d never heard of Castlebeat before, but now I’m definitely a fan. The above “Change Your Mind” music video showed up in the algorithm and the cute Japanese girl caught my eye. I clicked on it and loved it. The song reminded me a bit of The Radio Dept. with the whispering vocals. The footage used to make this video was taken from some Japanese short film from the ’60s. I’ve no idea what this movie is about, but this actress is very talented at expressing emotion.
Since I liked that video, next to be recommended by Castlebeat was this video of “I Follow.” This video uses footage from the movie Career Opportunities. That movie came out in 1991. I was 15 at that time and my adolescence was really kicking into high gear about that time. I had a subscription to Muppets Magazine in the ’80s and Jennifer Connelly graced the cover when Labyrinth came out and I thought she was pretty then. But in ’91, Jennifer Connelly and her boobs were so pretty and she became my imaginary wife. She was in other movies like The Rocketeer and Dark City, but after 2000 she became so thin and gaunt-looking. The most recent movie I saw her in was Top Gun: Maverick and she still doesn’t really resemble the round-faced beauty I fell in love with back then.
Lastly, check out this video. The previous two videos were fan-made, but this is an official video by Spirit Goth Records. I love the old ’80s video game arcade footage.
Castlebeat’s music can be described in different ways. Lo-fi, dreampop, shoegaze. I’m really not an expert, but I like the effect of nostalgia I feel while listening.
The Essence
This is a Dutch band called The Essence. Just as bands like Camouflage and Cause & Effect were like, “Shut up, we don’t sound like Depeche Mode! Depeche Mode sounds like us, so shut up or else!”, The Essence shares the same relationship with The Cure. If you didn’t know any better, you would have sworn that this is Robert Smith while listening. So listen to this or else you’re just not cool anymore.
“The Cat”:
“Only for You”:
“Mirage”:
The band isn’t a total ripoff, and the music is not derivative. No plagiarism, just similarity. The music is more post-punk than goth. Maybe a bit of a Creation Records feel to the music? And it’s not like the singer is doing the whole Robert Smith eye makeup thing either. I obtained their first album as mp3 format and burned it onto a CD to listen to in the car. I’ve been listening to it over and over for the past several days and I really like it a lot. It’s as if I’ve discovered some Cure albums I’d never heard before. I first discovered this band about a year ago as it showed up as a YouTube algorithm suggestion and I wish I had known this band 30+ years ago.
“Memories of Green,” when life imitates art
Someone shared this incredible video on Gab. It’s not often when such a simple video will grab me like this, causing me to re-watch it numerous times. This young man plays “Memories of Green” by Vangelis on some old piano on a sidewalk which appears to be somewhere in the UK. The passing traffic only adds to the melody, emulating the ambience of the Blade Runner movie soundtrack.
Whether this was a spontaneous moment or deliberately planned, this simple moment captures such incredible beauty, evoking a wave of nostalgia for my favorite movie. As others have said in this video’s comments section, it’s a pleasant surprise to see that someone so young would even know this tune.
It’s amazing how such a video can be so profound, striking a chord like this in my heart. As one commenter on this video put it, “This video restored my faith in humanity a little.” Amen.
Some UK Alternative/Modern Rock buttons I recently bought
I picked up some ’80s band button badges at AliExpress recently: Siouxsie & the Banshees, Echo & the Bunnymen, and The Smiths.
Strawberry Switchblade
You may not have ever heard of these two girls from Scotland, but Strawberry Switchblade made a HUGE impact on Japanese pop music and culture in the ’80s, and their style of music is exactly the aesthetic which modern-day Synthwave musicians emulate. Resembling something like dime store doll versions of Siouxsie Sioux, these two girls harmonized wonderfully to make cheerful-sounding New Wave pop music, infusing bubblegum sweet melodies with lyrics of melancholy. That android from Robot Carnival immediately comes to mind when I see their self-designed clothes, a polka-dotted amalgamation of Victorian and Flamenco styles. When you watch them, you can see their impact on ’80s J-pop and Harajuku fashion echoes their cute, punk rock doll aesthetic to this day. I see where Strawberry Switchblade heavily influenced the J-pop singing duo Wink in the ’80s. I can definitely see how their fashion aesthetic was a precursor to the “goth loli” fashion which sprang out of Osaka 20+ years ago.
While I was building the KUKQ playlist I mentioned in my previous post, their video for “Since Yesterday” kept showing up in my recommendations on YouTube. I finally clicked on it and loved what I heard. Then the more I thought about it, I unlocked a forgotten memory. I remember hearing a song by them on KUKQ when I was in high school, which was probably this same song. I fell in love with the cute female vocals and wanted to learn more. I think it was probably a Saturday afternoon when I heard the song on KUKQ, and I remember the DJ saying that they were big in Japan. I called in and talked to the DJ and told her how I thought that the band was so cool, and how I wanted to hear more from that band. My mom and sister were in the car waiting for me since we were leaving to go somewhere, but since I didn’t write down the band’s name and I never heard them again on the radio, I forgot all about them until recently.
Their song “Since Yesterday”:
“Poor Hearts” (I particularly love the chiming guitar in this song, and it reminds me of a cross between Siouxsie & the Banshees and Kitchens of Distinction.
“I Can Feel” is quintessential Synthwave.
A brief history on Strawberry Switchblade:
Interviews on Japanese TV:
Super neat stuff. I bought their CD, and hopefully it will arrive sometime this week. You can see how deeply they inspired the J-Pop band, Wink.
Here are a couple of interesting history videos on Strawberry Switchblade.
A playlist to re-create the KUKQ 1060AM experience
I’ve been on a retro music odyssey for the past month and a half, going back to so much of the music I loved in high school. I’ve bought CDs from R.E.M., The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Tears for Fears, and Echo & The Bunnymen. I’ve already gushed about my love for this old radio station and its impact on my teen years in my various Greg’s Life essays, so I won’t reiterate all that here. But these are the bands that were played on this legendary AM radio station. I found a few KUKQ playlists on YouTube. One was good, while two others were very short and limited (apparently one was a huge Cranberries fan). I was inspired to make my own playlist. At this moment, I am just short of 400 songs. Of course, there are no songs by Pearl Jam or Nine Inch Nails.
I snagged the KUKQ bumper audio from a file provided on the KUKQ fan page.
“Lovesong” by The Cure
I’d sing my precious little daughter to sleep every night with this song when she was a toddler. Now she is 15, and she still remembers me singing this to her. However far away, I will always love you. However long I stay, I will always love you. Whatever words I say, I will always love you, my precious daughter.
June? I thought we had June last year…
Well, June has only just begun… Hang in there! It’s Groomer Awareness Month, when degenerates making a mockery of womanhood hijack virtuous platitudes like “inclusion” to use it as a means of advancing their pedo predilections by shoving their junk into kids’ faces and literally promote evil with imagery of Satan and guillotines, like what happened at Target stores recently. It’s when Corporate America’s pandering becomes smokescreen for the indoctrination and the mutilation of children at the behest of Big Pharma, and we’re supposed to be happy about that. These corporations really couldn’t care less about the well-being of these people; they are only concerned about exploiting them for profit. Children are instinctively attracted to colorful rainbows, after all. They are being preyed upon by people who want to enslave them to pharmaceuticals for the rest of their life. Disgusting. So make this song your anthem for the month. Play it loud, run around your room, burn some calories, knock over some furniture if necessary. Lyrics are included. If you don’t know this song yet, TRUST ME, you’ll thank me for this. This based, politically-incorrect song is therapeutic and thrusts a big middle finger to debauchery and depravity. I’ve just listened to it for about the 30th time in a row now. God bless The Ramones.