MARIANNE FAITHFULL
Negative Capability
THE overall mood of Marianne Faithfull’s 23rd album is pastoral under the night sky. “It is the evening of the day…” from her most famous song, As Tears Go By, might as well be a fitting description of her new album’s emotional center.
With Nick Cave and Bad Seed’s Warren Ellis as songwriting partners, backing musicians and producers, “Negative Capability” teems with the lonely trek to a final destination. Neither death nor grief rears its head prominently. It’s personal emptiness that’s out front.
“Send me someone to love…”—Faithfull cries in one track. In another, she rues, “No moon in Paris, and it’s lonely, and it’s all I got…”The final song even intones, “You may be, the loneliest person/ But you’ll never, be as lonely as me…”
A cover of her own ‘80s anthem Witches Song revives the fire of her new wave days but beneath it all, she remembers, “Happy is the family/ Lonely is the ward.”
Faithfull’s musical associates oblige to the desolation without resorting to funeral dirges or dark metal laments. There are traces of the best works of Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash on this album. As she fades out into the sunset, Marianne Faithfull still stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the giants.
WAYO
Slow Dough
HAILING from Las Piñas City, five-man OPM band Wayo calls their music “rascal reggae,” or simply “rascalan”—most likely a “Tag-lish” twist on small-time mischief.
In execution, as evidenced by their new EP “Slowdough,” Wayo inoculates Pinoy rock with doses of hip hop, psychedelia and reggae to create a new breed apart from Pepe Smith’s favorite sonic beast.
Beelzebub gets things hustling on the rock and roll side of town. Reminiscent of a garage rock classic, the brisk acoustic strums provide an upbeat platform for a bracing love offering to Jesus’ archenemy that, in the end, does not reciprocate in kind.
Wayo recovers from such a life-changing bad trip with the self-effacing Lost Case, then picks up the pieces slightly in the great-sounding reggae of Voodoo Lady, where the source of shame gets deflected to some unnamed femme fatale. It’s another fall from grace from hereon, with the final two tracks featuring the troubled, almost psycho cries of the unloved.
Slowdough is one of a kind. Its short batch of rebel yells brims with character, a unique aesthetic and above all, a melodic tug that will get any blackened heart pumping with delight. Kudos, yo!
MUDHONEY
Digital Garbage
IN February 1995 Seattle grunge pioneers Mudhoney opened for Pearl Jam at the then-Folk Arts Theater. Virtual unknowns in Manila, they played the kind of splatter-noise rock, following in the footsteps of early Sonic Youth.
Almost a quarter century later, perhaps due to acquired virtuosic skills over the years, post-millennial Mudhoney simplifies the equation to the basics. Gone is the monolithic passion to be as noisy as possible. In its place are the essential elements that, interestingly, made their first certified hit Touch Me I’m Sick (circa 1988)—a memorable artifact of the pre-grunge era.
Mudhoney’s tenth and latest studio album Digital Garbage is crawling with punk crabbiness, beginning with the titular rage against digital technology. Organized religion, mass shooting, the filthy rich, and online suicide are in the thematic mix too. Paranoid Core gathers human pests in one song.
Garage rock, The Rolling Stones and MC5 figure prominently in the 11 tracks. Lead vocalist Mark Arm does a Jello Biafra in Paranoid Core. Opener Nerve Attack leaps from a Stonesy riff-a-thon to a Steppenwolf ripper. More Stones references kick-start Prosperity Gospel, then comes a second half of Crazy Horse jam proportions. These veteran outlaws have a chockful of bitter blues for all millennials.
ENCLOSURE
Tabula Rasa
THE sound of Iloilo City’s Enclosure isn’t exactly a blank slate. It rips, ripples, stutters and screams. It’s founded on a process of tearing down to make way for something new.
The band plays metal grounded firmly on hardcore punk, so what issues from their new EP “Tabula Rasa” are broad strokes of an odyssey in tribute to “British New Wave of Heavy Metal,” or BNWOHM.
Vocalist Vic Moscoso has the requisite hyperventilating vocals down pat and his bandmates prove up to the challenge of creating heavy music that’s special. Thing is, most folks will actually miss the point after listening to Enclosure. It isn’t the catchiest music this side of the E-heads. It is sometimes dissonant and occasionally instigates weird reaction from first-time listeners, e.g. slam dancing, mean growls, devil horns, etc.
It’s their loss because For The Fallen suggests Motorhead on a lightning-fast thrash binge, Survivalist and Pay Forward unleash thunderous unbroken assaults on the senses, and Mother (not the John Lennon song) interlaces slow and loud in waves of steady pummels.
The riffs keep on going relentlessly while the bass/drum axis morphs ceaselessly, until Moscoso and company have risen above the wreckage. This is one blasting concept from Western Visayas.
NARCLOUDIA
Day-Blind Stars
IN contrast to their album cover, Narcloudia, a trio formed by Filipino expats in Singapore, isn’t smothered with their fuzz. Rather, the symbolic image spews various shades of the dream pop the band has been known for since their “Sky Spectre” debut EP in 2014.
While referencing the black and white sides of the light spectrum, the trio plots out three-minute songs without essentially repeating themselves. Their core may be the shoegaze of UK pioneers My Bloody Valentine and Ride, but the injection of varying elements and textures works to make each track sufficiently different from one another.
In fact, there are moments that really stand out. Howl is one example. Opening with gently strummed guitars, it gallops to a folk-rock romp halfway through. Crisis slow burns in darkwave menace, as layered synths envelop the proceedings like creeping dust cloud. The bass and drums project rock-swing in Spiraling Mandy, even as the massed chords and reverb lead the song tumbling down a Goth limbo.
The gentle haunting vocals add a second sepia-toned dimension to most of the tracks, instilling a narcotic feel that washes over you. Narcloudia’s music is soothing and creepy within the same span. You can’t get any more beautifully eccentric than that.