Jesus, take the bill

MANILA, Philippines - With the country’s biggest and loudest rock festival upon us, the “Pulp Summer Slam 12,” music fanatics and local musicians themselves can’t hide the excitement with this year’s installment. Dubbed “Pulp Summer Slam 12: The Apostles,” Pulp Live World went all-out this year and brought in six international headliners, assembled six of the country’s finest local acts (including Kamikazee, Chicosci, Franco, Urbandub, Sin and Intolerant) and included six freebies in the ticket, including a Colt 45 beer, Pizza Hut pizza, Pepsi, Smart cell phone load, a stub for a P50 discount on the official Pulp Summer Slam souvenir shirt made by Tribal, and a free copy of Pulp magazine. Tickets are at a cheap P400 only, making this the best bargain for Pinoy music lovers nationwide.

And among the international headliners, there is one band that promises to be a most unique musical experience: one of the most explosive metal core groups of the millennium, August Burns Red, whose members—vocalist Jake Luhrs, guitarists JB Brubaker and Brent Rambler, bassist Dustin Davidson and drummer Matt Greiner—are true-to-the-bone Christians with a refreshingly positive message that’s rare among the genre.

Formed in 2003, the group began their first performances while a majority of the members were attending their senior year of high school, and after almost a decade of pummeling audiences with odd-meter guitar riffs and heavy breakdowns, the band comes out strong by being one of the most-awaited headliners tomorrow, April 28, as they received the most screams and applause from local music fans when the international lineup of this year’s Pulp Summer Slam 12 was revealed during the “Pulp Live World presents Children of Bodom Live in Manila” event last November 2011. Their most recent album “Leveler” sold 29,000 copies in its first week of release in the United States alone, and the band has since gone on to play big foreign festivals and shows like “The Vans Waped Tour 2011.” And the rest of the world, including the Philippines, took notice, as they were lined-up for this year’s Slam alongside the finest international hard-hitters: We Came As Romans, Bless The Fall, Periphery, Darkest Hour and Arch Enemy. And because of this, there’s a definite variety that is added to the show tomorrow, as August Burns Red proves the adage that there’s something for everybody in the mix, even listeners who might have mistaken heavy music to be all about gloom and doom.

So if you want to see and hear great music delivered with the good news for yourself, be sure to catch the band tomorrow, April 28, and bring along a friend or two. Tickets to “Pulp Summer Slam 12: The Apostles” are still on sale at all TicketNet, TicketWorld, SM Tickets, Odyssey, AstroPlus and Merriam and Webster bookstores outlets. Be sure to log on to pulpliveworld.com for the performance schedules of both the local and international headliners of “Pulp Summer Slam 12: The Apostles” and go to Pulp magazine and Pulp Summer Slam’s Facebook.com pages (www.facebook.com/PULPMagazine and http://www.facebook.com/SeeYouAtTheSLAM) for more details and promos.