Chilli Beans. -- lemonade

 

In my gastrointestinally stronger days, chili and chili dogs were some of my go-to foods. When I was visiting and later working at the International Student Centre at the University of Toronto, I became good friends with the house cook there, Vera, and whenever I ordered a chili dog, she would literally bury the hot dog in chili. Didn't complain one bit. It was worth the ten seconds of digging to unearth the hot dog. But over the years, my stomach and intestines gradually asked me to retire from the chili dog, so I finally acquiesced, and it's now been a couple of decades since I had it. Meanwhile, enjoy the above video by Cowboy Kent Rollins. I've been subscribed to his YouTube channel for over a year now, thanks to his down-home cooking.

Chilli Beans. is a female trio of popsters consisting of Moto, Maika and Lily. They formed up in 2019 when they were all students at Ongaku Juku Voice（音楽塾ヴォイス...Music School Voice）, a facility for vocal training set up in 1997 that has two schools in Tokyo and Fukuoka. According to an interview referenced through their J-Wiki profile, the name of the band didn't come from anything food-related, though. It was just that the first word was inspired from the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers and the second was a reference to the fact that they were a band that was just sprouting from the ground, ready to walk the path to greatness.

Their first works came out in 2021 including a debut EP titled "dancing alone" which was released in August. One of the tracks, "lemonade", which was created by the band and fellow Ongaku Juku Voice graduate Vaundy, is a sunny guitar-driven tune which seems to have some tsundere theme in mind. A young lady is in the middle of an existential tug-of-war between love and hate for a cool guy, but it looks like the former emotion is beginning to drag most of the rope to its side. Maybe the domesticity of the music video setting is sparking it, but perhaps I could call the genre covered here California garage pop.

A full album by Chilli Beans. came out earlier this year in July titled "Chilli Beans." on CD. It peaked at No. 28 on Oricon. In any case, if I had still been eating chili dogs, with all due respect to the band, I wouldn't have been downing lemonade with my old lunch dish. I'd have preferred to be drinking a lot of milk instead.