#173

Feel that? The dull thump of your heart dropping right into your stomach?

Early, sheer incredulous feelings at LOOK's performance in the Oricon charts have slowly given way to the sad realisation of the fact that I never wanted to admit: no-one cares about Halcali.

Given the highest placement of their new single, that seems almost comically obvious. Despite personally caring little or nothing for the song (the b-side is still great though), all of the recent efforts that Halcali have been putting into the promotion of the group made me believe, and believe strongly, that LOOK would hit the top #30 at least. Let's put aside the numerous concerts, TV, radio and magazine appearances (including that Zipper cover) and remember that Sony used this song as they used Tip Taps Tip, on the back of an anime.

Tip Taps Tip got to number #27. So what happened here?

OK, so LOOK wasn't exactly a candidate for single of the year, but I'm way beyond trying to equate "quality" with "chart placement", and isn't the (also Tanaka Yusuke penned) Tip Taps Tip in the same vaguely bland ballpark as LOOK?

The grim irony here is that Halcali made consistently better sales on an indie offshoot label than a full on major.

I wonder if Sony/Epic even cares. With yet another anime theme song coming up this month, it seems logical to suppose that the company took the most interesting and innovative J-pop band in the past 5 years and decided to waste them filling up some dead air in between one set of commercials and the next.

But still, an enormous feeling of increduability remains- for a band on a major label with nationwide exposure, just how did this happen?

Thanks to Jamie for the news.

SLIGHTLY MORE LEVEL HEADED UPDATE: The single reached number 82 on it's second week. Which means that at the very least, it did better than Twinkle Star. Scroll down this site to see.

Thanks to amj for noticing this.