June 2007

Rating:
OK. The Horrors.

Hmmm… where should I begin?

I like them, that’s crystal clear. Their pictures adorn my Multiply and LiveJournal accounts. They’ve turned me into a fetish over their Jack Skellington legs. They’ve inspired some drawings that I created and will create. And you know damn well how hard it is to objectively judge a record when you’re heavily attracted to a band.

But since nothing is purely objective, let’s just start dissecting their debut album, ‘Strange House’ (that I bought legally at ak.’sa.ra, in case you’re wondering where to find it in Indonesia).

Some reviews have warned me that the record is ‘trashy’, that if only we ‘could judge them by looks only’… so I think my state of mind when I tried to listened to the album for the first time was somehow balanced between the rather cold reception of other critics/reviewers and my own predisposition – if we may call it that – toward the band.

The album is opened by ‘Jack the Ripper’ that now sounds like Bauhaus and Eighties Matchbox B-line Disaster have joined themselves in a holy union (no, that’s a frightening analogy, let’s just forget it.). ‘Jack’ sounds heavier and gloomier than the previous punk-y version, but I love how the tempo changes about halfway through the song. All in all, I like ‘Jack’ – it’s a brilliant song, no matter how The Horrors recorded it. (You got some pulled muscles trying to dance to the previous version of ‘Jack’? Well, bite your nails in vain now, because the beat is again all wrong for you to try and dance.)

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Today I received some proof copies from KPG. The first one is of Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? (the result of a teamwork and a lot of editing, I bet). The book actually has been published sometime before. And also… of Larry Gonick’s History of the Modern World I (published here in Indonesia under the title ‘Kartun Riwayat Peradaban Modern Jilid I’, not ‘Kartun Riwayat Peradaban Jilid IV’ like I mentioned before).

I really enjoyed working on Gonick’s book, and although my editor naturally edited my translation here and there to make it even more funny, lively, and correct, I’m glad that some of the jokes I translated were accepted. Well, you can’t find a perfect translation for ‘It’s heretic clobbering time!’, bless The Thing, but there are jokes that can be adapted, such as:

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Two books that I translated are now on sale, both on Erlangga. One is under the Perti line while the other is under EFK.

The first one is Schaum’s Outlines: Biology, 2nd edition, by George H. Fried and George J. Hademenos. It is a book aimed to help students who take classes such as Biology 101 learning the concepts of biology, but it can also be used as a text book of the field.

The other book is the second part of The Giant Encyclopedia of Transition Activities. The original book is only in one volume, but due to its thickness, EFK has decided to split the book into two parts. The first part, Aktivitas Pintar Pengisi Waktu, has been published earlier; the second part is titled Permainan Kreatif Pengisi Waktu Luang in Indonesia. Both are books for parents and teachers of children 3-6 years old. Don’t think that it’s easy translating this kind of books. It’s frustrating to translate songs so that they can still be sung in the same tone without losing its intended meaning. Oh yes, it’s frigging hard, we finally got a consultant on the songs.

What other news? Hmmm… I’m working on some comics, soon to be appear here. One is a personal project, while the other is a project with my friend Vanessa. And next month, I’m scheduled to be one of the speakers in a discussion about Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha. I’ll keep you updated about this.

Credits please if using.

Pengelolaan Sumber Daya Alam Danau

Mitokondria dan Kekerabatan Organisme

Monitoring Populasi dengan DNA dari Feses

Rating:

The first time I saw a Rock n’ Roll Mafia picture in a teen magazine, they looked like a bunch of fresh-faced boys with a catchy name. When a couple of years later I finally got to see them performing live, they weren’t so cute and innocent anymore. The gig was marred by electrical failure, but the real problem was that the songs in their setlist were too long, far too long to bear except you’re high on something. Every song started brilliantly, asking you to dance along, but when you realised that the song seemed not to end so soon, you began to feel like kicking someone’s balls just to pass the time while the song lasted. However, their self-titled album made you thought that catching them live was better anyway.

So then, here in 2007, Rock ‘n Roll Mafia returns, with a new formation (some members have left the band, one departed to – gulp! – The Titans). Now they consist of a female singer, a male singer/guitarist, and a multi-instrumentalist (and a handful of additional players onstage). And with their album, RNRM once again joins the array of bands who want to reclaim the dance floor for indie kids – not only for ‘clubbers’.

While fellow indie dance kings, Jakartians Goodnight Electric, are more cheerful in general (witness their amazing Laser Gun Electro Boy), RNRM sounds bleaker, with themes like love scandals and loss (1000 Times Love Theme is a song for a grandmother who passed away a week after the song was written). Their new album, with songs like Dancing in the Echoes, Translove and Zsa Zsa Zsu, is mature and has a sense of direction, instead of a string of songs merely jumbled into an album. The sound production is astonishing, and like my friend said, perhaps ‘Outbox’ is the best record Fast Forward ever published. I begin to think that RNRM is even better than LCD Soundsystem. OK, some improvement is needed in lyrics section, but once you get the beats going, probably you won’t care too much about the words.

Credits must also go to the designer of the sleeve. (It is of interest that the growth of Indonesia indie music scene also spurs the healthy growth of young and creative designers and art directors; a good development, when you remember that many if not most covers of mainstream albums SUCK.) And a bonus: Jamie Aditya Graham, who lately seems to be ubiquitous, wrote the lyrics of ‘Too Many Questions’, and also sang the song himself.

Hey, you remember that TIME magazine earlier this year hailed Indonesia as having the best alternative music scene in Asia? Hell, they’re just correct. So go find your zsa zsa zsu.