Full of Hell Live in Manila

Imagine for a second that you’re in a constantly touring band and one of your members suddenly had to call in sick for the remaining dates of your Southeast Asian tour due to some health issues that suddenly occurred along the way. While most other bands would’ve very easily cancelled the rest of their tour dates until their sick member is totally fit to perform once again, Maryland noisegrind quartet Full of Hell decided to soldier on and visit the country while performing last Tuesday night over at Selda-Dos as a trio which – while a bit of a bummer that guitarist Spencer Hazard had to unfortunately drop out after experiencing some sort of mental breakdown while in South Korea – is more than admirable enough.

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Looking Forward to a November Full of Hell

Not a lot of shows to attend to this November but there’s one that fans of aggressive music in general SHOULD totally go to…

Attempting to Counter Pinoy Sinophobia Through Musical Education – Week 5: China Shoegaze Compilation

Shoegaze has seen a quite notable upsurge in recent years not just because some of its very well-known names have suddenly reappeared out of seemingly nowhere but also since a lot of relatively newer acts have been holding the torch and putting their own spin on a genre whose main defining sonic traits are often soaked in so much distortion, fuzz, reverb and maybe a dozen other guitar effects pedals I’m not even aware of.

DO U EVEN GAZE BRUH?!

Attempting to Counter Pinoy Sinophobia Through Musical Education – Week 4: Dear Eloise

Almost an entire month already into this whole series of posts which stemmed from all those Sinophobic comments made by some Filipino netizens coupled with my personal fascination with “The Sound of Modern China” and then some Weekend Edition article from NPR suddenly showed up on my feed last week.

“A Force of Habit” – GYHT

After being practically floored with a handful of metal and hardcore shows I attended to last month and then some, the Music Reviews section of this blog finally has something in it for everyone to see and/or pick apart. Kicking off my first-ever music review with an album called “A Force of Habit” by GYHT (formerly known as Goodbye Yesterday, Hello Today until the trio decided to just shorten their collective name to its 4-lettter acronym).

Band photo taken from GYHT’s official Facebook page.

Please do bear with me if it took quite a long while to deliver this entire review as I ultimately decided while working on a handful of long drafts to do a full-on write-up about “A Force of Habit” after interpreting a passage from a certain major music rag’s previous review of the said album which regarded it as “a head-bopping collection of songs that you just want to dissect one-by-one to fully understand the concept behind it” as a call to really come up with one.

Not even kidding.

Attempting to Counter Pinoy Sinophobia Through Musical Education – Week 3: P.K. 14

Looks like the wave of Sinophobia from the past two weeks had finally succumbed to a natural death… at least for now while everyone’s quite wrapped up with the upcoming election season instead of some netizens having some sort of unjustified beef with China.

Attempting to Counter Pinoy Sinophobia Through Musical Education – Week 2: Carsick Cars

Good thing that relatively fewer Sinophobic posts have been popping up on my Facebook feed as of this writing compared to last week’s unfortunate aftermath of that basketball game between our national team and that of China, *sigh of relief*. However, the humble mission of this ongoing series of posts on “The Sound of Modern China” remains the same: to decently try to counter any post-2015 FIBA Asia Championship Sinophobe I personally know or otherwise by posting about some bands from China that I honestly think deserve a fanbase here in the country. As promised, this week’s featurette is all about a Beijing-based 3-piece band called Carsick Cars.

Attempting to Counter Pinoy Sinophobia Through Musical Education – Week 1: Birdstriking

So there’s this recent news about the FIBA Asia championship game wherein the Philippine basketball team (aka Gilas Pilipinas) had been defeated by that of host country China with a score of 78-67. While I’m not really much into sports in general (which therefore makes me less than qualified to talk about anything regarding basketball in full detail), I would like to think that it had been a very tough yet well-exerted effort our countrymen had pulled off despite some rather unfortunate circumstances that had surrounded them along the way to, during and even after the finals.

King Ly Chee + Sick of It All Live in Manila

Aside from being my year of birth, 1986 was the year a small band from Queens would virtually help shape the New York variant of hardcore punk and gain a worldwide following as a result, proof being one just CANNOT talk about NYHC (New York hardcore) in general without mentioning the name Sick of It All. And just a year shy of their upcoming 30th anniversary (wow!!!), SOIA – for some who prefer to keep things really brief in true hardcore style – has embarked on a Southeast Asian tour and included a few countries where they haven’t performed yet in their itinerary.