Category Archives: Out of Print

Update… We Were Hacked!

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To make a long story short:

Friday afternoon, ex-Romeo Void singer Debora Iyall had discovered my overview of It’s a Condition and posted the link to it on her Facebook page. Since I’ve been Facebook friends with her for awhile and had participated in her Kickstarter campaign for her new EP, I knew about it because she had linked to my personal Facebook page in her status update about the post. I hadn’t told her about the post (I didn’t want to be spamming her page or whatnot) so I was happy that she had found it and was giving me props right back for giving her old band props.

For whatever reason (a bit of ego, maybe?), I went to click through the link on my iPhone (I was at dinner with my mother at the time) and found myself getting rerouted to a .ru page that was basically dead. What?

Thinking it was some odd Facebook quirk, once I got home I got on my computer and checked the link. Through Chrome, I got the same dead page. Through Firefox, I got a fake virus scan site that (thankfully) Norton had cockblocked before any damage could be done.

Yep – some fuckers — probably Russian hackers — had somehow gotten into the account that holds all of my music blogs (The Groove Music Life, Music Is Like Oxygen, my Reina Tanaka worship blog So Hot She Shits Fire) as well as the blog for Resonant Blue and a blog for a friend’s charitable work (Sounds For Scoliosis, a series of benefit shows in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area booked and promoted by my friend Lucia Peregrim). Going directly to the main sites was fine… but anyone clicking through a link from just about anywhere (Google, Bing, Facebook, whatever) was getting redirected to some Russian pecker’s malware festival instead – and making me look bad. So bad that one of Debora Iyall’s friend had gotten hit with that shit, forcing the link to be removed.

So, after a few phone calls to my hosting provider, here’s what happened – the hackers had gotten into a file called .htaccess that, in the case of these blogs, works within WordPress installations and makes sure whoever visits one of my blogs is seeing one of my blogs. The hackers had replaced it with their own version that, within its hardly-complicated code, tricks links from search engines and social networking sites into taking people’s browsers into the Russian assholes’s virus playground instead.

Thankfully, a little Google research – a few seconds worth, more than most Tea Party members do – turned up how to fix this shit, using only Notepad and an FTP program. But I had to do it for every WordPress installation on my account – a minor pain in the ass, but it had to be done. Now all links should be fine.

Now, I don’t know if this kind of thing can affect the “free” WordPress blogs hosted on their own server farm, but if you’re independently hosting your own WordPress blog elsewhere, here’s what you should do to make sure these hacker motherfuckers aren’t messing with your hard work. With your FTP program (like Filezilla), check the size of the .htaccess file on your server. If it’s a little more than 200 bytes, you’re fine. If it’s bigger than that – the hacker’s version was over three thousand bytes – delete it immediately, Google for “.htaccess wordpress” and you’ll find a proper code to get your blog back to normal. Boot up Notepad, cut and paste (or type it up) it exact, and use your FTP program to upload it to your server. Note that you can’t simply just upload the clean version over the dirtied one – some of their code in the dirtied one prevents that, so you have to delete just that file.

My apologies to anyone who had been affect by visiting one of my blogs – in fact, at the time of this writing there was still a malware alert for So Hot She Shits Fire, which I’ve already applied for a correction on with Google. (Right now a direct search in Google warns that the site might harm people’s computers, especially if they don’t have something like Norton installed.) Everything on all of my blogs should be safe.

MINIMONI “Minimoni Song Daihyakka Ikkan”

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MINIMONI
Minimoni Song Daihyakka Ikkan
(Zetima)
Availability: Out of print (used copies only)

This one’s in honor of Mari Yaguchi’s 29th (!!!) birthday today, since it was an idea of hers to start MiniMoni in the first place. Mari had an idea to start a subgroup for Morning Musume that featured members 150cm and under, and between her and MoMusu’s songwriter/producer Tsunku, the band was formed with her, MoMusu bandmates Ai Kago and Nozomi Tsuji, and American-born Coconuts Musume member (and offspring of jazz pianist Johnny Todd) Mika.

It’s a little disturbing to find that both of MiniMoni’s albums are out of print – both albums were two of the many records that spurred me to get heavier into Japanese music in the first place, and the band itself inspired my Here Is The Wonderland novel project [which I'll be finishing once Resonant Blue is out of my hands and into readers'].

One of the reasons that Minimoni’s music had such a hardcore effect on me was how ridiculously varied their music was – even more so than their mothership group Morning Musume. The band’s first long-player, Minimoni Song Daihyakka Ikkan (translation: Minimoni Song Encylopedia Volume 1), which compiles most of their singles tracks up to that time, runs a bizarre gamut of styles. Of course, their first single, “Minimoni Jankenpyon”, should have been the first clue as to what these girls were going to deliver: mariachi horns, drum-and-bass (the EDM style) loops, synth bass from a Mini-Moog (no pun intended – not by me, anyway) and some bizarre lyrics about playing rock-paper-scissors.

From there, it gets even crazier, touching on everything from martial music, jazz, soul, blues, blues, techno, and whatever else Tsunku’s fertile musical mind could come up with at the time (metal got left out, but an enterprising Minimoni/Hello! Project fan did a homemade Metallica-inspired remix of “Ai-in! Dance no Uta”, one of two tracks done with comedian Ken Shimura’s “Baka Tomo-san” character for a joint single, to make up for it).

Minimoni would do a bunch of other singles, a movie, and another album (which I’ll write about at another time) after a personnel change (Yaguchi left the group, passing the leadership torch to Mika and bringing in another MoMusu member, Ai Takahashi, to round out the new lineup), but by 2004 the project was put in hiatus – Mika went back to America to study music in L.A., Ai Kago and Nozomi Tsuji already had another project, the duo W, to concentrate on (they would be graduating from Morning Musume later that summer), and Ai Takahashi would find herself leading Morning Musume itself in a couple of years.

I miss them.

ACE FREHLEY “Anomaly”

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ACE FREHLEY
Anomaly
(Bronx Born/Rocket Science)

Three things led me to look at this more recent release – something I actually reviewed at TGML when it first came out. (And for the record, I stand by every word I wrote in that review.)

1) Reason one, the most mundane, came from a Facebook conversation started by friend and ex-Black Flag vocalist Ron Reyes (aka “Chavo” on the Jealous Again EP), where he waxed rhapsodic about his love for KISS in general and Ace in particular.

2) Reason two: His former band just announced that they’ve completed recording the follow-up to their 2009 album Sonic Boom (which itself got reviewed at TGML, albeit not as glowingly as Anomaly).

3) Reason three: Another Facebook conversation between two other friends, none of them famous but both still musicians, about this album. One friend lamented that he had gotten it for a birthday gift, loved it, lost it (ouch!), had trouble finding another copy, and was considering just downloading a new copy from iTunes.

I, unashamedly, had pre-ordered the iTunes edition, unsure of whether I’d get to the record store on release day and wanting to start off my work day by listening to the album anyway. Somehow I managed to get to the store anyway. I also, equally unashamedly,  ordered a signed double vinyl copy from Ace’s website. Why did I all this? Well, like I told Ron Reyes this evening – and like I pointed out at the start of my TGML review of Anomaly – Ace Frehley, for all intents and purposes, put that guitar in my hands back in 7th grade; all of my punk rock guitar heroes helped keep it there.

Well, out of curiosity, after the conversation mentioned in Reason Three, I did a little curious peeking around regarding Anomaly. Guess what? Good luck finding a copy of the American edition. In fact, it isn’t even on iTunes anymore.

Anomaly was manufactured and marketed here in the States by a company called Rocket Science. They handle distribution for artists on an independent basis using a non-traditional  platform, and under short-term licenses. I’m not sure what happened, because Anomaly came out in September of 2009, and 2012 only just got started a week ago – the third year isn’t even half-over yet, unless something transpired where either Ace and Rocket Science had a parting of the ways,  but anyway you look at it, there’s no way to get a copy of Anomaly without either ordering an imported edition or trolling eBay. And that shouldn’t be. A “comeback” album that good shouldn’t be lost to the ether. At the very least, it should have remained available digitally. And if I were Ace Frehley and his people, I’d be looking into that now minus one. 

WHITEBERRY “Chameleon”

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WHITEBERRY
Chameleon
(Pot Artist/Sony Japan)
Producers: Norio Sakai, Ginji Ito, Hirokazu Tanaka
Availability: Out of print (used copies only)

Not long after getting the idea for this blog, I had quickly narrowed down between two particular albums for MISO’s first post, both of which are J-Pop/J-Rock related (I definitely had to do that given what this blog’s mothership specializes in). This immediately became the choice because this is the album that really got my interest in Japanese music started.

Back in 2001, I wanted to find a way to check out what was going on musically in Japan at the time. File sharing wasn’t really an option – I was still on dial-up and wouldn’t have broadband internet for another five years. I don’t know how I stumbled upon it, but I learned of the existence of YesAsia.com, did a little poking around, and came across a couple of Now-style compilations of then-recent Japanese pop hits. The first artist to catch my ear was a five-member girl group whose representative track, “Natsumatsuri”, sounded as if they had some almost progressive-rock-esque backing behind them. Wanting to find out more about them, a little web research revealed that the five girls heard singing were also the ones playing the instruments in the background. THAT got my attention rather quickly to the point where I ran right back to YesAsia and ordered their first album, Hatsu, which quickly became one of my favorite albums. A few months later, I caught wind of the news that they were releasing a follow-up album and promptly did my first J-Pop pre-order, which would end up being for the album at hand here, Chameleon.

Not unlike their first album, Chameleon became even more of a favorite release – to the point where I took it with me when I took a car trip to Toronto for Wrestlemania X-8 in March of 2002. I had burned a nine-volume mix-CD set to listen to on the trip, but once I had exhausted all nine volumes on the way back, I elected to stick Chameleon in my car stereo, where it stayed for the rest of the trip. When I got my first iPod in 2004, it was one of the first albums I added to my library – and it’s never left. There isn’t a bum track on the album.

Chameleon shows the five-piece band (singer Yuki Maeda, guitarist Aya Inatsuka, bassist Yukari Hasegawa, keyboardist Rimi Mizusawa, and drummer Erika Kawamura) at their peak – a notable remark considering that the five of them were all in their late teens at the time they recorded this album. Yuki Maeda had improved considerably as a singer in the year-plus since Hatsu had been completed, a process that had been slowly chronicled on the singles that had been released prior to this album, a re-recording of their After School EP track “Akubi” and the advance singles “Kakurenbo”, “Sakura Nakimichi” and “Tachiri Kinshi”. Much of the album is solid pop-punk (keyboard-enhanced but still primarily guitar-driven) – “Tachiri Kinshi” in particular is the punkiest track in the Whiteberry canon, but there are also quite a few stylistic side trips, like the dark ballad “Yoru to Kiri”, the anime theme that never was, “Tansansui”, and the heavily Chinese-influenced song “Chuugoku Yonsennen No Koi”.

The album’s closer, “10 Years After” seems a shade poignant in retrospect, ten years later: Whiteberry would close out 2002 by issuing three singles with cover-version A-sides and original song B-sides, one apiece during the last three months of the year – and then suddenly get quiet for all of 2003, owing in part to the fact that various members of the band were either finishing high school or starting college. They started off 2004 with a new single, “Shinjiri Chikara”, whose lyrics – penned collectively by the entire band – were in part about how much they missed playing together during that year of inactivity. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks after that single’s release, the band announced that they were calling it a collective career after two final gigs – one in Tokyo and one in the band’s native Hokkaido. Two years later, Yuki Maeda and Yukari Hasegawa would turn up in a new group, Yukki, that released one EP on an independent label. Yukari would depart that band not long after the EP’s release, leaving Yuki to carry on; She would later retcon the group into a new outfit, The Husky, that would release two EPs and an album independently before calling it quits in February of 2011.

Sadly, most of Whiteberry’s recorded output is now out of print, save for two compilations: the band-authorized greatest hits album Kiseki – The Best of Whiteberry, issued a few months after their disbanding, and the slightly more exhaustive Golden Best Whiteberry anthology, issued by their old label in 2008 – but used copies won’t be hard to find on eBay or elsewhere on the web.