The Boston Bastard Brigade are sad to report that there will be no new Podcast episode this week due to the recent snowstorm.
Back in 2009 I came across an anime series called Seitokai no Ichizon (translated here as The Student Council's Discretion), which featured five students in a student council discussing their lives, opinions, and thoughts regarding the rules of their school. The series mostly took place in a single room, with almost no changes in the settings and pace of the program. Despite this Twelve Angry Men approach to animating the series, the show delivered a lot of surprising laughs, especially when it came to poking fun of itself. (Watch the first couple minutes of the first episode, and you'll see how good they do this.) Now after over three years of waiting a new season has come to fruition, and while they change the formula a bit the chuckles still keep coming at the same pace as before.
It's something when an opening act has the gusto and power to nearly steal the show from the headlining act. An event such as this happened last week when we went to see Flogging Molly, when a five-piece band from London, England came marching onto stage and took the audience by storm. Called Skinny Lister the group tore through their tracks with zest and the sort of domination one would seem more fit for a festival crowd of 30,000. The band proved themselves as an amazing live act, but does that energy tread well in a studio album? In Skinny Lister's debut album Forge & Flagon the answer is a resounding yes.
In January of last year a group of friends and siblings from Midlands, Ireland banded together to form the band The Winter Passing. After spending their first year playing live, recording split vinyls with Forrest and Sleeping Weather the band are now set to release their first EP in March: Scrapbook.
With a lot of shit hitting the fan last week, the Bastards were forced to open up a portal to a world last tread in a past life.
It's surely a coincidence when two four-panel manga-based anime series of almost the exact same premise and run at the same length of time arrive in the same season, yet it has happened here this winter of 2013 with the release of Choboraunyopomi's Ai Mai Mi and Kagari Tamaoka's Mangirl! Does one series fare better than the other, or do both show have their highs and lows?
