HBD Insert Coin(s), here's present for you all! And farewell 2018...
- Dec 5, 2018
- 6 min read
Greetings Subhumans & Superhumans
Google Maps sucks with bus stops. Enter a train station, a statue, whatever, you could hit an igloo with an ICBM, but bus stops? You’d have better luck hurling darts blindfolded at a paper map. Having recently moved to an area with a hundred different bus stops and no rail, as a frequently mobile individual, experience has reinforced this hypothesis. If I want lunch at home between my Monday AM and PM, I have a 10 minute window within which to produce and consume my sustenance then board the nearest bus to catch my connecting train to make it on time. But what if I want to continue watching the Joe Rogan podcast I began with my breakfast? I’ve aware that “Google Maps = bus roulette”, but today’s was a compelling subject, so I’m ready to roll the dice. It’s telling me a bus will leave from bus stop ‘X’, which is ‘here’ on the map, at ‘Y’ time which will take me ‘Z’ minutes to reach on foot. Sounds straightforward. I depart a minute earlier than suggested, to arrive at a bus stop with the name ‘X’ on the sign, indeed only about 10 metres earlier along the route than Google indicated. Hooray Google, you did it! So here I am, waiting…oh, what’s this on the timetable? No bus stops here until ‘Y’ + 20 minutes? Weird…looking up I notice the word ‘次’(‘next’)to the left of the station ‘X’.It is ‘Y’ minus one minute, just before the bus is scheduled for ‘X’. I see the bus approaching in the distance. I anticipate the direction of the route, and the probable location of bus stop ‘X’. Can I make it?
Last Sunday the 3rd of December 2019 marked auspiciously the first birthday of our debut EP, Insert Coin(s), a fact which did not slip us by. We discussed how to celebrate at practice and decided to to do it by letting you have it for free until Christmas. Think of it as an early Xmas gift from us. You’re welcome. We put a lot of ourselves into it and we’re not quite done with it yet. We’re still very proud of the songs that are on it and we’d like to continue sharing it with as many people as possible in the hope that it will one day reach the people we know are out there who still enjoy guitar-based rock music.
You can download Insert Coin(s) for free here until Christmas. Just click on the 'Get Album' link next to the player. If you have any browser troubles just shoot us a message and we will work something out for you.
2018 has been a bumper year for us with plenty of highlights. We’ve had the chance to do shots with some really unique foreign bands such as super tight party animals Quor from the US, as well as some really unique Japanese artists such as theatrical rockers HellDump and industrial grrrl-rock of HellRise (a lot of hell in Japanese music it seems). 2018 also saw some great releases by local foreign talent, one recent release of which, the Cacti Lights, I’ve been listening to today and I gotta say, the bar for production and song writing quality is getting right up there. There’s so much going on in the import musician scene here in Nagoya right now and to quote some dumb movie starring Kevin Costner once acted in, “if you build it, they will come”. Well, we’ve started building it but we’re still waiting for them to show up, but rest assured, we’ll all be kicking arse in 2019 soon enough and we have all slowly but surely been nudging our way into the non-English speaking scene.
2018 was not however without its struggles. One among our ranks finally levelled up to a [redacted]. This appeared to have been quite the time vampire for the past couple of years but with that out of the way he can focus on playing music. In other struggles, soon Pete will be going under the knife to become a bionic superhuman in order to both increase his chances of survival in the impending collapse of it all, and to improve his guitar picking hand to entertain you better. No kidding!! In the earlier half of 2018 big gaps in time, created by members going back home to Australia, the US, the UK and myself travelling through Europe for a month, have made it hard at times to get back into the groove, but we came out on the field for the second half of the year ready to cause damage with over sixteen shows to close us out for 2018. Travelling far and wide to share our music with as many a receptive ear as we can find has seen us driving home in a torrential downpour after midnight sans wipers, Rob taking the sunrise Shinkansen home to teach a class of snotty-nosed kids after partying until 4AM, myself waking up in the wrong capsule with nothing but the undies around my backside, and sleeping beauty Mike awaking to the spectre of a salaryman to let him know it was time to get up and meet me for Taco Bell breakfast. We’ve played to a few smaller crowds and in a few situations that turned out to be quite different to what we had imagined, however you know struggling is just like pushing weight – it builds your struggle muscle so you can struggle harder!
To top off the bad news in 2018, seminal Nagoya metal band Each of the Days will be hanging up their instruments following over a decade of rocking Japan due to member issues at the end of the year, so please go and check them out this Saturday the 8th of December at Club Zion. It’s (probably) your last chance.
There is good news though, and it reads that we’re heavily into preproduction for our next EP. After pinching pennies all year like miserly knaves, we’re almost in a position where we can afford to jump back into the studio and I’m really looking forward to getting into this one. You may even have heard a couple of the songs as we’ve been beta testing them on the road recently. We’ve a few songs that are almost ready to go, and as many that are well on their way. Personally, I’ve learned a fair amount regarding music production since doing Insert Coin(s) and I’m eager to put my new knowledge to use. I also feel the pressure to maintain the level of quality releases that the gaijins have been putting out.
We have one more show for you all this year to help relieve the Christmas fatigue we know you’ve all been feeling ever since the pumpkins came down and the tinsel went up. We’ll be having our anti-christmas party at Atlantika in Toyohashi on the 22ndof December to aid you in waiting out the silly season with booze and rock. It will be a full electric show in the basement but with electronic drums so it isn’t too hard on your ears. That will basically tie up all our loose ends for 2018 and we’ll be taking a break until mid-January when we’ll assess where Pete’s bionic recovery is at and see what we can do to prep for recording until he has reached peak bionically enhanced musicality. In the unlikely case of amputation, we have decided that Pete can swap places with Mike so we can fulfil our original goal of becoming a successful Def Leppard cover band.
We’re planning a mini-tour around Tokai and Kansai areas in February to squeeze every last bit of life out of Insert Coin(s) as we gear up to release new music sometime in the middle of the year. We may or may not throw in some cover shows in there if we feel the demand for it. Or if we start running short on coin – producing music costs money folks!
I’m on the bus now in the opposite direction on my way home from work so I guess I made that bus if you were wondering. I had to race the bus to make it in time but luckily I’m a fast runner. Look forward to hearing some harder rocking, more intense, more technical, and potentially thought-provoking new music from us in the coming year.
GOH Luke
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