Music

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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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.

Rating:
A hall of records, or numbers, or spaces still undone. Ruins or relics, disciples and her young

Well it can’t be helped. Any review on Klaxons records will always, always mentions about sunken cities, lost civilizations, ruined ancient buildings, future love, time travel, Cyclops, centaurs and magic. Any such review will also quote the lyrics of Four Horsemen of 2012: There’s a half-man half-horse that still polutes my thoughts as he rides on a flame in the sky….

That’s what Klaxons, the most visionary band in the last decade, are all about. This is the band that describes their music as ‘when Buzz Aldrin returned to Earth and became a Muslim’. They have a vision, perhaps visions. Their debut album, aptly titled Myths of the Near Future, contains music that has the potential to change the shape of Music forever. Klaxons have actually done it earlier last year, when they woke Britain up with the siren at the beginning of Atlantis to Interzone and helped the birth of so-called new rave. But as lesser bands come and go, Klaxons hid in their studio and poured every ammunition they have into the album – and so they have come out with a groundbreaking record that surpasses anything ever happened in new rave. And, probably, in Music. Punk-meets-dance has reached its peak with Klaxons. Read the rest of this entry »