News

The new album, MAGIC, is set to be released in a few weeks, which inevitably meant we were in for the sample treatment. On the official band site, samples of every song are now available and they are sounding brilliant. There seem to be no shortage of hard rock tunes, either.

Check out those samples here, but that isn’t all. One month ago (as Tobias reported here), B’z were on bayfm78 to play back some songs from the new album and talk about their career. That radio show is now available online with no region restriction. (The stream is only available until December 31st, 2009) You can hear several songs from the new album in streaming quality as well as listen to Tak & Koshi on the station’s designated subsite. The songs featured are the Introduction, TINY DROPS, and the titular track, MAGIC.

Not much else to note on the new album front aside from a bit of information coming out about the CD+DVD edition. The backstage documentary included in that edition has a runtime of 67 minutes, so see if that factors into which edition you decide to purchase.

MAGIC will be released on November 18th in both a CD edition and a CD+DVD special edition, for 2940 Yen and 3780 Yen respectively.

Update: Apparently, the show proved so popular that it was viewed online 10,000 times within the first day of being uploaded.

News

We originally planned to post this back when it was first announced, but now that the samples are out, it’ll be a much more interesting news bit.

Eric Martin, who most of you will recognize as the vocalist and chief lyricist for Tak’s supergroup project back in 2004, TMG (as well as the frontman of Mr. Big), has another “Mr. Vocalist” collection coming out. Martin has been recording covers of predominantly Japanese songs for cover collections (aimed entirely at the Japanese market, as you may expect) for three albums now.

Well, the latest one is focused on the upcoming quintessential holiday of Christmas, and you know it wouldn’t be a music Christmas without a certain B’z song.

The tracklisting is as follows:

01. Christmas Eve
02. Winter Song
03. Itsuka no Merry Christmas (English Version)
04. Christmas Carol no koro ni ha
05. Shiroi Koibito-tachi
06. Silent Eve
07. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
08. Koibito-tachi no Christmas
09. Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
10. Last Christmas
11. Do They Know It’s Christmas?
12. White Christmas

As denoted above, Eric Martin’s cover of Itsuka no Merry Christmas by our favorite band will be an English cover. After quite a bit of a wait, you can finally hear a sample of it here.

Mr. Vocalist X’Mas is to be released on November 11th, the same day as Slash’s SAHARA single featuring Koshi on vocals.

For those eager to grab a copy of this CD, here are the places you can order it at:

Order at: http://www.CDJapan.co.jp
Order at: http://www.yesasia.com/us/
Order at: http://www.yesasia.com/global/