Dickens of a Blog

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

tuki.’s “Third Planet” [MVP #9]

In some ways, “Third Planet” is probably not the first song by tuki. to which I would recommend you listen, but I do like it…

The reason I’d almost say hold off is simply because there have been a number of songs by the young songwriter which have dealt with longing and self-discovery — all the way back to her breakout hit, “Bansaka” — and this one feels to me like something of an answer to those. Things can be a bit flawed and unknown, but we work together and try and make something.

The video’s end does combine well with the voice to blend some plaintive elements in the mix. A metaphor about crashing into someone who is significant to you for a certain period of time and then saying goodbye. Not all bad. Not all good.

Something else.

The video is a bit like a femme, glitched out Project Hail Mary for those into that sort of thing.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). 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 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 Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts.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.

The Mailbox Spider

NOTE, some folks are pretty sensitive to spiders so I’m going to save the actual photo of the spider until after a cut, but just note that there will be absolutely a photo of a spider if you continue down this post. The header has a bit of a preview that’s been washed out so hopefully it’s not too bad.

mM7th’s “Growth” [MVP #8]

Last night was just chilling with Kaz when this video popped up for the second or third time in my recommendeds. The interesting name of the band — mM7th = Major Minor 7s, and written in a way that makes me think “myth”— is partially what did it. And I’m glad I did…

Though the jazzy driftiness of the whole thing is really good, just the part early on where she sings (note: as translated by them for the video), “Tell me, Pascal, about the badness in me, now that I’ve learned to want things…,” is where I started to fall in love with this song. Not just the lyrical shot at Pascal, but also the way she pops out the word “Pascal” very nearly like a muted curse.

You also have the moment at the end where she sings and the on-screen lyrics suddenly stop only to return in the silence after the song:

Swayed in the soft breeze under the shade
Touched it with bare hands out of curiosity
I call this flower “Happiness”

The fact that you can see the soap still on the street from her “washing hands” moment earlier in the video brings home that earlier line about the wickedness of wanting things.

mM7th is just hitting overall and currently has < 2k subscribers and only 5 songs on their channel. If you like to jump in early on bands, here’s a chance.

For other recommends, I’d say 逆様 which they released to international single as “Antithese”. Somewhat similar in theme, but a bit jazzier. It makes a nice companion piece.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). 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 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.

Crazy Blues’ “YoungGirlsNeverApart” [MVP #7]

I can keep this absolutely short and sweet:

Thank God for bands like Crazy Blues keeping precisely this genre of music alive…

The visual and audio shift right before the minute mark is so divine it almost makes me teary eyed.

Might not trust that pie, though. Or that cat. Would absolute be glad to hang out on a different but nearby mountain and jam to the tunes, though.

Crazy Blues doesn’t have the deepest back catalog yet so now is the time to jump all in, but if you had to pick another song then maybe “Lot” as their biggest hit (just watch out for some flashing imagery [if sensitive, look away around 4m mark]).

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). 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 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.

Muque’s “Still Not Enough” [MVP #6]

I think sometime (soon) I’m just going to have a “week of Muque,” “week of Brandy Senki,” “week of Yorushika,” and so forth and get it out of my system.

But for today we turn back to another “just premiered” song for the Music Video Pick of the day. Muque’s “Still Not Enough” (「たりない」)…

It’s a catchy song with a fairly simple video but it grows on you on replay. Just watching folks vibe out is nice. It is always interesting to have a song this upbeat with a video so laid back have a lot of lyrics about it’s “just not enough” but realizing its not enough is the first step to hope, eh?

My recommendation is to pick a dancer or two and just watch how they get through the whole thing. Lots of variety. Take a few trips. Worth it.

My favorite is see-through-Green-shirt man:

No “See also…” for this one because I’m going probably just post most of them. Lots of good songs.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). 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 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.

MVP Bonus #1: Trying to remember Shirotsume Biboroku’s “Accelerator Pedal” (with a lot of assumptions and time)

While prepping for this [eventually-not-Daily] Music Video Picks series, I have been doing some mental sorting for music videos from the past year or so that I know I have liked. Trying to turn it into actual sorting into playlists and notes. That kind of thing.

Then, something occurred that took some time to fix… I had a “pretty clear” notion of a video that I watched in 2025, but I realized I had it tagged incorrectly in my brain. Let me explain…

My mental notes went something like this:

  • Japanese (absolutely sure), heard on Youtube (absolutely sure), and not a song I had downloaded at the time (pretty sure)
  • Female singer (almost entirely sure but I left in the exception that it could have been a male-fronted band with a female-presenting actor on screen since that seems common enough)
  • Alt Rock // Shoegaze (really sure)
  • Person is in a green field (fairly sure) and there might be some shots of an ocean or body of water (maybe sure). There is 100% a green/gold motif in the color scheme
  • There was a scene with a picnic table and this is possibly at the end as a celebration (pretty sure)
  • The guys in the video (bandmates?) are doing various tasks while she is a more a wanderer (it was getting flimsy at this point)
  • There is a scene where the singer (?) rescues her male bandmates (?) and they drive around in a Japanese-style mini-van (I was sure of the car scene, other aspects maybe less so)
  • A scene with a person on a ladder? (I don’t know, man)
  • I heard the song around the time I had found out about wowdow and Chili Beans and was listening to those bands (like, maybe…it was getting pretty vague)
  • This was tied into the mental stress of the international move and was part of that era where we constantly boxing and packing up stuff and Youtube was a primary media experience. May or June 2025?
  • I kind of remembered the video and channel having a lower subscriber and view count, but so it goes because luck and The Algorithm are both terrible role-models (actually pretty sure about this)

Then a day or two ago I went “Wait, what song was that?” For reasons I do not know, at least not clearly, I realized my brain had come to associate the song with either Crazy Blues or tiny yawn. Except I have music from both of them and listen to them on fairly frequent rotation [and Crazy Blues should show up on MVP in a day or two]. Despite being of a similar music fit, there were no close videos in either of their catalogs.

I had a mental cataloging error and I wanted to fix it (while showing a band some love).

As I begin a shallow dive, I got discouraged super fast. Because both Goat Life’s “Narcissus” and Yureruwayurei’s “Echoes of a Fading Girl” showed up fairly fast in my notes/lists and had the kind of visual imagery that was really close but also completely different. You also had Kurayamisaka’s “Sekisei Inko” (I think I only listened to this once, around that time, but it was nice). Again, not really close, but certain elements showed up that made me start to wonder if I had mashed together several visual tropes and came up with a song that did not exist [at least not anywhere close to my scant memories].

I looked through my liked videos (which Youtube caps at 5k1) and a large music video playlist I’ve kept for a few years but have let lapse for several long stretches. Neither had anything else that was a closer match.

I sorted the Entire Youtube Watch History options to just “music” and spent around half an hour doing a deep dive through all of 2025’s for myself. Nothing showed up better than the three, above.

There was a non-zero chance that even I had not Frankenstein’d a video out disparate parts, I might be looking at a piece of removed media. My music video playlist had a half-dozen or so that were gone. In a couple of cases, I could get some information. In others, I had pretty much nothing besides a note that some were unavailable. If I have liked more than 5K videos since watching it and hadn’t saved it to a playlist to begin with, would Youtube even tell me about the gap in my history? No seems to be the answer.

This morning I sat down and gave myself an hour and a half to go page by page through my Youtube history. All of it. 1000s of videos. Random shorts. AI slop pushed into Up Next. Multiple copies of the same song or video rewatched a few times. It took a while. I mean, it took a while just to get back to August 2025.

Assuming I was correct in my timing.

Then I went to more or less every music video in the list and clicked on them (unless I knew them pretty well). Just in case I was recalling a few scenes out of context. Knowing that there was a chance the video was just gone. Or that I had already found out in pieces across other videos.

I figured if nothing else I would go all the way back to January 2025 and hoped my browser wouldn’t melt.

From April 30, 2025, I found this cluster of things:

And viola! Presenting to you as very special bonus episode of Music Video Picks: Shirotsume Biboroku’s “Accelerator Petal”:

My brain had recalled almost the exact placement on the shelf but not name of the band or song. Reference librarian brain is weird.

Now that I had the song, though, let’s take a look at how close my other details were:

  • Color motif was pretty spot on (there was more blue than I remembered, but I can see my brain would have shunted that to a more filler color)
  • Many of the storyboard details were actually correct as was the general band composition and genre but there were odd gaps and mistakes
  • The vehicle is in a significant amount of the video not just a quick shot like I thought
  • The picnic table shows up for a nice scene and then kind of makes a much shorter cameo than I recalled. Glad I wasn’t skipping to the end of the videos or it wouldn’t have worked at all…
  • There is no ladder at all. One of the band members is doing some work next to a tree and that’s all I got
  • Body of water is pretty dang significant

Song is good. I like it a lot. I wish I had gone back and listened to it more when it was fresh but it was a rough time to sort stuff and no doubt a lot of things got lost in the wash.

Unfortunately, looks like I found them at pretty much the exact wrong time. Shirotsume Biboroku had shrunk over 2025 and 2026 to just three members and then just two and then just one (the drummer was the last to go). Or maybe it’s the right time, just in case the channel and video does actually disappear. At least I have a record, now.

There was a good bye concert very recently. Like, 25 July 2026. Just last week. I wish them all super well.

The most recent song, “Atmosphere” is good and not a bad way to go out, all things considered.

If Hana Ohara ever rebuilds the band, I hope Youtube lets me know before a full year has passed. Otherwise, I might have to go digging again.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). 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 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.

CREDITS

Most of the artwork comes from obvious places and linked videos. The last picture is a screenshot from their IG page (it’s linked if you click on the photo).

The four “memory bank photos” are all from Unsplash:

  1. Eventual spoilers, I think it had capped out right before it would have exposed the song, by the way. That’s how my Youtube videos I like. ↩︎

Nanajuuhachi’s “Time Lapse” [MVP #5]

Had something else in mind for today but new stuff should always trump the backlog and since this video is around 5 hours old at the time I post it: it wins.

It makes an interesting contrast to “Roller Coaster” with its muted color schemes, introspection, and generally more downbeat self-analysis. Lyrics deal with feeling like you are out of sync with the life other people plan for you and being left behind as other people go off on their — presumably more successful, but maybe only in her eyes — journey.

You could 100% say that the person chiding someone for being too serious in “Roller Coaster” is talking to the person of this song. They are same person. That is likely on purpose.

Little details like the slow increasing of color as the song goes and the use of the bridge and waterway to demonstrate the liminal space are nice. I especially like the touch that at the end the view swings around to show another bridge.

It’s not about the destination, here. It’s about navigating the times in between.

Also, fair play for the “time lapse” pun [a lapse in time, being lapped, all sorts of word chews, there].

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos (usually from Youtube). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). 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 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.

Nanajuuhachi’s “Roller Coaster” [MVP #4]

Decided to tweak things up a bit with this list before it becomes unmanageable.

AKA, I got tired of typing “Doug’s ‘Daily’ Music Video Picks” every day.

AKA, the ‘daily’ joke had the chance of getting old pretty quickly once I get through the backlog.

In honor of being truthful, let’s look at the video that essentially STARTED the idea.

Nanajuuhachi’s “Roller Coaster” is a fun summer song about hitting a breaking point and needing to break away from 24/7 to just embrace the fact that life (and romance? friendship?) is like a roller coaster.

It’s cute and pleasant and a nice song to have stuck in your head.

When I came across this song — thank you, The Algorithm™ — it had only a few thousand views and I felt it was simply too good for that. It has sense picked up some steam — Nanajuuhachi is killing it in taking advantage of the moment — but the germ of the idea of just sharing music here more or less grew out of finding this song and going on a deep dive to listen to all the existing tracks.

Just share stuff I like, all that.

As always, I tend to share folks whose back catalog I consider to be all good but in this case I’ll leave you with these two:

The latter getting a special shout out because it is a premier set to come out tomorrow [as of me writing this] and I’m excited. It’s fun to find a new artist.

My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). 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 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.

The song that got me really back into songs… Yorushika’s “Plover” [Doug’s “Daily” Music Video Picks #3]

It would be absolutely incorrect to say that I hit anything like a musical rut over the past year but I had kind of gotten to a point where I was just kind of recycling the same few songs. Not that there is anything wrong with listening to Ado’s Best Adobum for the dozenth time (or more).

However, when Yorushika’s “Plover” hit, it just lit a spark that is still burning bright:

I had already heard several Yorushika songs by that point (mostly off the Second Person album, like “Plover,” which I highly recommend) and had liked them but I was prior to March it was kind of like new and fun music would drift up and then settle back into the noise with only a few standouts.

Jamming out to Yorushika for a few weeks helped all music sound better. Even bands/performers that I had been listening to for years — like Majiko or twenty-one pilots or Oliver Tree — started getting sorted into playlists. I started filling in gaps in the catalog. I started reading up on genre shifts.

I openly braced my absolute adoration of Japanese music and starting playing a lot more indie groups from Japan. It has been nice.

No longer is something like just dragging and dropping a few albums into VLC working for me. I’ve been off an adventure of testing out music apps and ways to back-up my collection.

Thank you, Yorushika.

There is a lot of music I could recommend (short answer: all of it) from them but we’ll stick to two for the second (both also from the same album):

The way that Suis says “Hai…” around the 3min mark in “Martian” melts me, and once you brain realizes the symbolism of “Forget It” it is just a bit soul crushing. Lord.

There’s another one that I am saving because it should show up soon as a two-fer for the band.

Doug’s Daily Music Video Picks is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. Not actually 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 the most recent songs here: Doug’s Daily Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.

When 171 comes a’calling… 171’s “Love” [Doug’s “Daily” Music Video Picks #2]

Admittedly, I had a different idea for a video today [which in theory will show up tomorrow….unless…..] but right as I sat down to write the post about it and why it was a good #2 choice, 171 dropped the video for their new song “Love” and you have to put some respect on 171’s name.

There are quite a few tracks in 171’s back catalog I could shout out but I’ll stick to just these three (listen if you like what you hear or what to try something else by the band):

Probably in that order. “Footsteps” was my first introduction and it was love at first listen.

In conjunction to the release of “Love” is a 3-song EP — MUSIC YOUTH LOVE. That or their full length album, HELLO!, are both disks to pick up.

Doug’s Daily Music Video Picks is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. Not actually 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 the most recent songs here: Doug’s Daily Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.

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