New single!

New single!!

It's called LOOK!!

It's out December 13th!!

!!

Here's what the press release tells us.

1. It's their first single in 10 months.

2. The song will be featured as the theme tune to the Japanese version of the popular (is it still popular?) American animation Powerpuff Girls, which has been renamed Powerpuff Girls Z for Japan.

3. Early pressings will come with a DVD (details here) featuring the video to the song Gatochou, which they recorded for the show Takeyama Teacher.

So Sony are taking the Tip Taps Tip route again, and attaching the song to an anime.

Based on the amount of (American version) PowerPuff Girls merchandise that's already on sale in Japan you might have assumed that the show would be popular enough in it's currant format to warrant a straight dubbing of the American version, instead of turning it into a the same cliched, dime a dozen magical girl anime, a hundred identical versions of which are already available on a hundred different channels.

It also strikes me that the marketing of this band is, once again, all over the place. If all of Halcali's recent material (going back to No Susume) indicated a general mood of "growing up", then why attach the new song to a show aimed at little girls? Even Eureka 7 had a mature anime feel about it. The answer is obviously because it's a popular show and it's advertising that requires no effort and takes care of itself. But iit's annoying that even after all this time, Sony still don't seem to understand what they have with Halcali, or what to do with them.

That said, hopefully the appearance will make the show big enough to pull enough new fans to the record shops to banish all thoughts of Twinkle Star's abysmal showing in the charts.

Since this single is coming out in December, it looks like album three won't be rolling out until early 2007 at least.

The show featuring LOOK will begin airing on Tokyo TV from October 7th.