Dickens of a Blog

The third iteration of Doug Bolden's various thoughts and musings.

A Hearty [year-long] Farewell to an Amazing Band… Scandal’s “Koisuru Universe” [MVP #25]

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On 2026-08-30

In Doug's Daily Music Video Pick, Music, Music Video

Scandal has just recently announced that after 20-years together as a band they are going to embark on a year-long, 47-prefecture concert and then finish off with a big solo-show [I think I can link directly to Youtube posts, I have no idea…if not, I already wrote the gist]. It is an astounding run and while I am of course sad to see such an amazing group go, I am much more appreciative than sad to have had a chance to listen to them for a while.

Which brings me to a video that is a bit different than their rest, and an inspiration for all of us wanting to share ice cream with our besties, Scandal’s “Koisuru Universe”:

It’s not their most watching video and not my favorite song from even the same album, Honey, but as one of the top comments used to say: “It is a vibe.”

My second favorite comment I have seen said something like, “When the singer is late to band practice, the band has to figure out something to pass the time.”

With about finally meeting someone that makes it all make sense and not even God can interfere with the attraction between them… I don’t, maybe it’s a metaphor.

At any rate, it is a vibe.

Anyhow, Space Pilgrims, if you want to know: my favorite song from that album is is probably “Take Me Out.” Might be my favorite Scandal song of all time. I don’t really know. They have had a lot of good ones. I’m going to have to deep dive and see how it goes.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.

You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.

De-J-‘ing My Music Collection (well, some of it…)

By

On 2026-08-28

In Music

Photo by Finn Mund on Unsplash

One of the causalities of my PLEX music library crashing was a feature that is not wholly unique to PLEX but is strange absent by default in a lot of others: Country of Origin.

There are a lot of musicians that carry their nationality with them in their style and presentation but are also not completely limited to it. Generally there is nothing to stop someone from another country from having a similar style. Sometimes language does make an impact about what kind of sounds work best, but even then, well…

However, there are times where the country/language get heavily linked to the genre identifier and this specific to some countries.

You don’t tend to see The Ramones sold under US-Punk while The Clash gets hit with UK-Punk. That gets brought up, sure, but it’s not treated like a meaningful genre signifier.

When you buy some Japanese music, though, it might be labeled as precisely as J-Rock or J-Pop or J-Rap (sometimes J-Pop gets used to absorb all of these).

I’ve also seen World Music, International Music, and other variations of that get slapped to pretty much any non-English track. The one that irritates is me is seeing entire Japanese language albums listed as “Anime” for a genre. And I’m not just talking about those singles used as anime OP/ED.

There are of course some situations where a country code works in an absolutely meaningful way. A lot of what I call K-Pop sounds like K-Pop to me (as a term I don’t precisely limit to to music from South Korea). And some J-Pop is pretty unique to itself (before we even get to distinct subgenres like City Pop). There are plenty variations of folk music and scene music. Some of the latter blends out with the Internet but even now you can find moments where some chunks of the world are producing a specific sound.

There can also be a relative meaning. Japanese style shoegaze can have differences than shoegaze from other places.

It is just, overall, I don’t treat The Pillows as substantially different than The Smashing Pumpkins, Pommelien Thijs as substantially different than Paloma Morphy, or Band-Maid as different from The Warning.

The latter, by the way, sort of inspired this. The way that The Warning don’t get slapped with M-Rock while a Japanese band might be slapped with the J-.

AND TO BE CLEAR, I AM NOT SAYING YOU DO THIS. You are probably fine. I mean, frankly, I don’t care if you come up with a half dozen country and locale codes. “This is Vlaanderen Muziek, or as I like to say, BeVla-Pop.” Knock yourself out, Space Pilgrims.

At any rate, my plan is just to build a custom MP3/M4A tag, Country, and apply it to all my “J-” bands and then swap out their genres into a few categories. Alt, Shoegaze, Rap, whatever. I’m not going to speed run it. Just tweak it a bit. I thought about doing the same for language but frankly that’s unnecessary. This is my own music library. If I ever get into the moment where I just have to hear a French-language song, I’m sure I can figure something out.

NMIXX might get their own genre as NMIXX, though. I don’t know.

PLEX tags, how I miss you.

[Synced Lyrics for…] The Warning’s Everything’s Falling

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On 2026-08-28

In Music, Synced Lyrics

Look, The Warning has popped off hard enough that I’m sure someone will have uploaded these (and probably multiple someones) but this morning as I was sitting down to jam out to the full album for the first time there were only three songs fully synced (being the singles): “Ego,” “Kerosene,” and “Ritual.”

I really liked the album and figured it could be fun to fire up LyricSynapse again and get them all in place [and tweak a few timings on the existing ones].

The results are in the Drive.

Think my favorite is possibly “Bite My Tongue” but I’ll give it a few days to sort through.

Felt wrong picking just one to be in the header so I flipped it sideways. That also feels wrong but what can one do?

I am sharing lyrics when I have contributed significant amounts of time syncing them [and in some cases: translating]. These are mostly for a personal project and the original lyrics, timings, songs, and so forth are all property of the performer and songwriters. My personal contribution is being released CC-0 but this does not include the lyrics themselves OR their translations. I make no guarantee about the translations.

Lyrics can be found via Google Drive. They are almost always in LRC format and in a naming convention that matches my source {Bandcamp, Apple, etc}. You might need to change them to suit your naming scheme if it varies.

[Synced Lyrics for…] Crazy Blues’ “Natsu, Kakenukeruyona”

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On 2026-08-26

In Music, Synced Lyrics

Crazy Blues released a new song, today: “Natsu, Kakenukeruyona“. I really like and have played it a good handful of times already.

While I’m sure someone will have synced the music is no time at all [turns out the video has timed subs and it would have been trivial to get those], I thought it might be nice to go through and do my own syncing. Sometimes I like breaking up lines a bit differently than “normal” and this one has a few repeated lines and diversions I had fun working in.

The “hey!” “ooo” and “aa” might not be the most exact, but that’s what they sounded like to my English speaking ears so I went with it.

All in all, it matches up with “YoungGirlsNeverApart” and “Light Song.” Crazy Blues is a perfect name for their sound. Joyous and wistful in equal measure. Whatever EP/LP they are cooking up will be astounding.

I am sharing lyrics when I have contributed significant amounts of time syncing them [and in some cases: translating]. These are mostly for a personal project and the original lyrics, timings, songs, and so forth are all property of the performer and songwriters. My personal contribution is being released CC-0 but this does not include the lyrics themselves OR their translations. I make no guarantee about the translations.

Lyrics can be found via Google Drive. They are almost always in LRC format and in a naming convention that matches my source {Bandcamp, Apple, etc}. You might need to change them to suit your naming scheme if it varies.

My Favorite Two Photos from 12 Aug 2026’s Eclipse

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On 2026-08-24

In Daily Life

Barbara and Kaz holding a collander to create the many-mini-eclipses effect.

I don’t have a lot of photos from the afternoon of the Full-to-Some, Partial-to-Us solar eclipse which happened on 12 August 2026. I have a few though, and the above and below ones are my favorite.

There’s a bonus Doug in the shadows, there.

I think my favorite part was everything wearing “mermaid scales” as the eclipse passed through the trees.

Also, apparently Kaz’s t-shirt was apparently just a coincidence.

The best pro-cilantro propaganda you will see all day… Veno’s “Pakuchi” [MVP #24]

By

On 2026-08-24

In Doug's Daily Music Video Pick, Music, Music Video

I’ll be real, I was going to avoid premieres for a half second to focus on the backlog AND I had planned to do a monthly-check-in type thing today but Veno just dropped an astounding song about cilantro…

Ok, maybe not so much about cilantro but about being a taste that stands out — for better and worse — rather than something that other people offer. It’s a cute way of using a well-understood food metaphor to flirt.

I support this.

And Veno is a queen of food-based flirtations. From the more obvious “Midnight Lu Rou Fan” to the somewhat subdued request to sip some orange juice in “Don’t Stop the Thrill.”

I really like this song. Ok, NOW…now I’ll try and get through the backlog.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.

You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.

[Synced Lyrics for…] komsume’s “Baku*,” “Fake,” “OK!,” “Lycoris,” and “Orion”

By

On 2026-08-23

In Music, Synced Lyrics

When I started the process of translating komsume’s lyrics, I semi-expected some of the newer tracks — like “Lycoris” and “Orion” — to maybe need to be synced by me but I was a bit surprised to find out that their first single — “Baku,” which has actually three tracks — was also not synced.

And for some reason their first EP, Hankouki, didn’t seem to have the third track synced. At least not in the databases I use. Shazam users might be eating just fine. I don’t know. That’s between them and their god. They know what they did.

They were my next project because I love listening to komsume. Again I used LyricSynapse and for the first time did almost all my work in it, alone.

Some of their lyrics really confused the program.

To explain, imagine you had a pair of lines like this in English:

My heart is full of a winter
Snowstorm blowing anger and white

Except you sing it like this:

My heart is full
of a win
ter snowstorm blow
ing anger and white

It is a perfectly cromulent way of singing and kind of the way I write poetry, but it can confuse programs looking for a bit more of a gap. This means a few lines kind of have to trip over each other in my timing.

Also, the lyrics I found posted for “Shissou” were missing the final, “疾走” (aka, shissou, the name of the song). And there was a few “woah woah aaa” type bits I added in though others I left out. It’s all vibes, here.

“Baku” has a longer spoken bit — “(足音が近づいて呼吸が早くなって 都合の悪いことからは目を背け続けた 辛いのは全部自分のせい そう思えば少しは楽になる気がした)” — that I just put in parentheses (pictured) but treated as a single line rather than trying to break up the bit.

I am sharing lyrics when I have contributed significant amounts of time syncing them [and in some cases: translating]. These are mostly for a personal project and the original lyrics, timings, songs, and so forth are all property of the performer and songwriters. My personal contribution is being released CC-0 but this does not include the lyrics themselves OR their translations. I make no guarantee about the translations.

Lyrics can be found via Google Drive. They are almost always in LRC format and in a naming convention that matches my source {Bandcamp, Apple, etc}. You might need to change them to suit your naming scheme if it varies.

[Synced Lyrics for…] kurayamisaka’s Summer Film

By

On 2026-08-22

In Music, Synced Lyrics

UPDATE: I finally realized that the third/final repeat of the “soap bubble lines” only repeated the first and second portions. I have now cut that out and fixed the lyrics in the drive. Assuming I drug and dropped that into the folder correctly.

kurayamisaka dropped the MV (and single) for “Summer Film” recently and I thought the video was neat and really, really dug the song…

…as well as it’s b-side: “Hamabe Ni Chiru.”

BUT, not only was neither track properly synced there was an omission of the submitted lyrics for “Summer Film” and the search I was doing for HNC was coming back with lyrics for some entirely different song.

The omission by the way can be heard at around the 4:10 mark in the video. There’s a nursery rhyme being chanted in a way that blends a lot with the music. I used Ultimate Voice Remover to separate the lyrics out and could get it a bit clearer but couldn’t completely place it without some digging.

Turns out it is the first three lines of “Shabondama” being repeated. If they are saying the fourth line, it is completely swallowed in post production. I assume they are NOT saying the fourth line, because it is the line about the soap bubble popping when it hits the ceiling. By leaving that out, the bubble is still hitting the ceiling, but it persists. Which goes along with the shirt being worn in the video: “There is always light behind the clouds.”

Even though video depicts something like loss of someone you love, or at least some sort of separation, it continues to show bubbles rising even as the people fade.

It is likely a coincidence but the imagery of water falling while air rises makes me think of the I Ching hexagram “The Well” (48) which is all about reaching deeper into yourself to find new resources while avoiding shallow thinking. As the water sinks below the air, it becomes “Dispersing” (59) which is can be about letting go of your interior barriers and expanding yourself. Both fit themes of the video, I think.

At any rate, I have linked the lyrics above which includes the “Shabondama” lines starting in roughly the right place but initially there is a bit of a blend.

Tools used this time include the two usual suspects — LyricSynapse and Foobar2000/OpenLyrics — but with the addition of Ultimate Voice Remover which should save some time on some future versions of my big old lyrics project.

I am sharing lyrics when I have contributed significant amounts of time syncing them [and in some cases: translating]. These are mostly for a personal project and the original lyrics, timings, songs, and so forth are all property of the performer and songwriters. My personal contribution is being released CC-0 but this does not include the lyrics themselves OR their translations. I make no guarantee about the translations.

Lyrics can be found via Google Drive. They are almost always in LRC format and in a naming convention that matches my source {Bandcamp, Apple, etc}. You might need to change them to suit your naming scheme if it varies.

The final (for now) Durry video: “Dead Media” [MVP #23]

By

On 2026-08-21

In Doug's Daily Music Video Pick, Music, Music Video

I have survived a second week of a band-spotlight and this roughly wraps up the first month of this [I skipped a couple of days and weekends] so let’s get to the Durry Week finisher, “Dead Media“:

“Dead Media” started out a bit differently. It was originally a hidden track on their physical copies of This Movie Sucks: a celebration of “owning” songs and not just streaming them.

Now, of course, it has succumbed to the pressure of Spotify and the like, but for a brief-ish moment it was a testament to its own lyrics before it became a testament to its own lyrics:

I’m an addict
I admit it
But it’s how I
make a living
Selling cheap tricks
But I got it
A few more seconds
Of your life
I’m like a vampire
For your time

It is an odd moment for the more socially aware artists to realize that they are part of the noise that they often write against. In another Durry song, “Bully,” we hear the lyrics:

Greetings people of the internet
It’s your friend from the real world
I’ve been reaching out
trying to make contact
But all I’m getting back
Are really mean comments

Only Durry is not your friend from the real world. At least, not for the majority of us. For most of us, Durry is very much so a band we found through streaming sites and Youtube. Being addicted to the “cellphone light” is how we learned the joy of listening to Durry.

From a whole other artist, you could see Grandson’s “Brainrot,” a video that might feature in the next round so I won’t deep dive too hard. We get a lyric talking about people with their new smartphones having batteries “mined by a kid in a warzone.” Only, smartphone users are Grandson’s target audience.

It is a dissonance rampant in this current era. I can rant about The Algorithm™ all I want but without it, no one will find this blog. Without it, I would never have had Durry’s “Who’s Laughing Now?” or Grandson’s “Blood/Water” recommended to me.

I imagine I am a good bit below the average phone usage of many modern people — it’s not like being on a desktop all day really makes a huge difference, mind — but that phone which represents capitalism at its spikiest and the potential death of a future is also a gateway to a potential better future.

One where we own our own dead media before the AI chatbots buy it all up to consume it and destroy it. The bastards.

Also, Spotify sucks. I use Youtube Music (technically, more like I use Youtube [obvs] and some of the stuff is a byproduct of YTM) so I’m being a hypocrite but they mostly all suck. Pandora at least tried paying people. I…think…Qobuz is ok. Nice FLACs is the only way I use it.

For real, Space Pilgrims, go and buy your shit and then curate and show it off and share it and stuff. Stop letting AI-generated playlists replace your control over your own media. You’ll be dead soon enough.

We are being trained to listen to artists who are being trained to beg us for likes just to keep making art while AI-bros who own the platforms are shilling the heat death of the artistic universe.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.

You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.

[Synced Lyrics for…] Sam Vazquez’s Es Lo Que Hay

By

On 2026-08-21

In Music, Synced Lyrics

I love listening to Sam Vazquez sing. She has a voice which is very much her own thing. Like a musical instrument dancing with words from the middle of the tongue. With just enough post-production to map a way through the mountains of lyrics that fit so well with her talents.

For example:

I am really happy she released a full album. It snuck up on me this past month. I like all the songs but some of the standouts for me are “Es Lo Que Hay,” “Mua Mua Mua,” “Quierre Quierre,” and “Dime Que Me Quieres” (with Big Sempa).

Only a couple of the songs on that album were synced even as of today so I spent a couple of hours syncing every song and doing some tweaks to the lyrics to better match the rhythm of what is actually sung [putting in repeated lines, better reflecting the number of times words were sung].

There are a few places with overlap I did the best I could.

As of now, these v1.0

I used LyricSynapse [had it working better than yesterday] with back-up support from Foobar2000/OpenLyrics.

Songs are untranslated Spanish but feel free to slap them into Google Translate (etc) and get them in whatever you language you prefer. No matter which language you speak, you should listen to more Sam Vazquez.

I am sharing lyrics when I have contributed significant amounts of time syncing them [and in some cases: translating]. These are mostly for a personal project and the original lyrics, timings, songs, and so forth are all property of the performer and songwriters. My personal contribution is being released CC-0 but this does not include the lyrics themselves OR their translations. I make no guarantee about the translations.

Lyrics can be found via Google Drive. They are almost always in LRC format and in a naming convention that matches my source {Bandcamp, Apple, etc}. You might need to change them to suit your naming scheme if it varies.

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