An inordinate amount of each of my days (a good 90-120 minutes) is spent driving to and from work, and I’ve been listening to a lot of local radio as a result. I’m not much for pop music so I’m usually tuned to either 103.5KLite or NU107.5, both of which lean toward a more rock-friendly selection.
The past couple weeks, the after-work timeslots have been dominated alternately by Kjwan and/or Sandwich, and let’s just say that it hasn’t been very pretty. I’ve never liked either of these two bands very much, and their current singles are very nearly the musical equivalent of fecal matter in your coffee.
Kjwan’s "Pintura" (listen to it here)
With a riff that takes way too many cues from early 90’s Rage Against the Machine (my first thought: hey this kinda sounds like a lame "Bulls on Parade"), and Marc Abaya’s signature, self-congratulatory vocalizations, this is the kind of rock song that you simply cannot take seriously. Abaya has this to say about their recent stint at the #1 spot on NU’s weekly countdown:
We did it! Today, we made it to the top of the NU107 stairway to heaven
countdown! I am so happy and am still trying to take it in by calling
my bandmates and screaming AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
Nuff said.
Sandwich’s "DVDX" (listen to it here)
Raymund Marasigan is the kind of artist that values quantity over quality, and has made quite a name for himself churning out uninspired "alt rock" drivel by the boatload. DVDX belongs to a sub-genre I like to refer to as checklist lyricism. Like their compatriot Cambio’s "DV," "DVDX" does not, in fact, have lyrics; instead, its "writers" created a checklist of keywords related to the theme of the song, and simply strung them over the music. In DV’s case, it was street names, in DVDX’s case, it was video categories. Neither song is even remotely interesting.