Masaker his left foot

After around 40 years of writing reviews, you’d think it was time to hang up the old gloves, time to get sick of it, but not necessarily when an album like the Brockas’ Masaker comes trotting on Spotify, their third as per count of the music streaming platform, give or take a few singles/EPs. Jury is still out on this one, except to say it’s all what we’ve come to expect or not to expect from the anti-band, with their customary good humor and carefully nurtured indulgences.

There’s always something to be said for a band comprised of formidable artistswritersfilmmakers of their respective yet overlapping generations, notwithstanding obvious melodic limitations or barebones instrumentation that comes with the territory, at times ears have to strain for a worthy bass line. But what’s not there could make the listener imagine assorted bass riffs playing in his or her head.

No doubt though that this is Khavn dela Cruz’s band, he being the most musically accomplished, not to make light of Roxlee’s colorings on random harmonica disarmingly streetwise, or Lav Diaz’s almost invisible guitar making presence felt in rambling scales seeking to climb out of the bottom of a lake. You’ve heard about a wall of sound, the Brockas offer you a soup of electric vertigo, haphazard but rife with possible extrapolations.

A few cuts stand out, not least Mendiola which could be the title cut, the proceedings a veritable soundtrack of found footage of past massacres, including the one that occurred on Mendiola in the fledgling years of the first Aquino administration. You could almost hear unspooling of reels, scent of blood on the editor’s cutting room floor. Here not to see is to believe, the Brockas the best audiovisual band in every sense of the word.

As for Diliman, it brings out memories long buried in the UP campus, with its milieu of scholars and village fools, including one who talked to lampposts in the lagoon, perhaps exchanging a joke or two with a stray used condom, not only is this academic freedom but an assault on the senses of bygone times: “Ang dilim sa Diliman/ Ang tahimik ng katahimikan/ Ano ang totoo sa katotohanan/Wag mahulog sa kahulugan…” and immediately comes falling for the nth time a student from the fourth floor ledge of the then College of Arts and Sciences, disturbing the debaters in the basement with their coffees and praxis deep in ideological doldrums.

Tsismis has some lighthearted moments, a shout-out to the irreverent and irresponsible social media, and a footnote to the age of instant small talk. Songwriter chose to use the conventional term for marites, though it doesn’t imply singer is dated. Tsismis by any other name is still gossip, a centavo for your marites.

Maybe a companion piece to Tsismis would be Bitter Words, where showbiz lingo is used to good effect in chronicling a breakup. In a few minutes, hear the tragicomedy of theater, the laughing/crying mask that could be an indirect tribute to all the showbiz talk shows in the world, past, present or future, not to forget the late Inday Badiday’s trademark spiel, careful...

Then there is voyeur and cineaste’s delight For Adults Only, where everything you never needed to know can be gleaned by watching for adults only films, why not cut to the movie theater lobbies of Quiapo and Sta. Cruz, the standalone theaters now consigned to oblivion with their gaudy colorful posters of currently showing potboilers that had the glasses of dirty old men misting over, and in the midst of the fiesta atmosphere, we read of a retired basketball player being shot in the buttocks in a massage parlor. Everything we never needed to know, indeed.

There’s always hope that millennials or Generation Z may find something here that delights, but better not bet on it. Enough that old fogeys like us have an album to doodle with while waiting for the next novel, graphic or otherwise, or next film, epic or not slow, from these same guys themselves getting on in years, though must say we miss the likes of John Torres and Shireen Seno who could make the Brockas a superband, or super-duper anti-band.

Just saying, and hoping, too, a collaboration with like-minded renegades Dong Abay Music Organization (DAMO) is in the works, though the guitars and bass and percussion there are a totally different animal.