The best of Rakenrol

Love Team

The Itchyworms

This single appeared on the band’s second LP, a concept album called “Noontime Show,” and is their most subversive hit song to date. Of course, the pointed lyrics — which not only expose the illusion inherent in showbiz love teams but also empathize with the people who are in them — are intriguing enough. (If you look at it in tandem with Marie Jamora’s even more subversive music video for it, which starred Gerald Anderson and Kim Chiu, it’s also been proven to be prescient.) But even the music itself is not as simple to play as its catchiness seems to imply.

Wasak na Wasak

The Radioactive Sago Project

Put simply, this is (still) the “real” national anthem for these tumultuous times.

Believe

Throw

Without losing any of the incandescent rage of his earlier work, Believe is Al Dimalanta as he is now. It isn’t the punk rage of a young man but rather that of an older that we hear on the title track of Throw’s third album. The ex-Dead End puts the scene (which he was such a big part of) in perspective and gives us hard-won wisdom you wouldn’t think characteristic of punk. Let the Jello Biafra comparisons be finally laid to rest.

You Wear Me Out

Cambio

Taken from their second album, You Wear Me Out doesn’t sound as heartbreaking and as emotionally distraught as it truly is. On the surface, it’s quite joyous to listen to — not least of all because of Buddy Zabala’s ecstatic and assured bass playing. Much like on her earlier collaboration with Cambio band-mate Diego Mapa on the electronic track, Train, it’s Kris Gorra-Dancel’s words and delivery of them that gives you the full impact of the hurt at the core of the song. This is what only the best pop can and should do and what almost no ostensibly “pop” act manages to do today. If anything else, this track makes us believe that supergroups can work. 

Everything Refuses to Move

Hannah + Gabi

Always managing the delicate trick of making bitterness sound wistful, Mikey Amistoso continues to find ways of rebuking ex-lovers the sweetest way possible. In Everything Refuses To Move he’s really come into his own, from being the “boy least likely to” to a modern troubadour. He should be breaking more hearts than his own at present.

Mateo Singko

Dong Abay

Notwithstanding the obvious biblical reference in the song’s title, Mateo Singko achieves a transcendence that is far more due to the pagan pleasure of listening to the crystalline poetry of Dong Abay’s lyrics, his emotive rendition of their meaning, and the sensitive arrangement of the music. (Then again, this might just be the definition of all religious ritual anyways.) If you’re not moved when you hear this song, then you might want to seriously question your humanity.

TNT

Pupil

Ever since the beginning of his career, Ely Buendia’s certainly had a penchant for marrying life-affirming melodies to the saddest lines. With Pupil, he’s chosen to explore more ambiguous and dense territory musically but without necessarily obscuring his innate ability to craft a pop tune. On TNT the chord changes thrust ever forward even as the lyrics hint at a gradual disintegration. It is an anthem of entropy. But rather than mere despair, it confronts the inherent disorder, by not only accepting it but finding a renewal of sorts by the changes it brings. The track also shows the further maturing of Buendia’s talent as a lyricist, one who can still convey love and loss without resorting to cliché or being artsy-fartsy and still make it resonate with the telling image. (“Kahit ulan, kailangan diligan...”) He might be growing stranger than when he started, but he’s much the greater for it.

Oo

Up Dharma Down

A 21st-century torch ballad, Oo may be one of the very few moments that a hit song in that vein really sounds like it was drawing blood from its performer. Those five notes that usher us in — and serve as the song’s melodic hook — provide the proverbial “spoonful of sugar” for the medicine to go down. To be sure, it made us willingly open our mouths for more helpings.