From Goth to India

The local goth-rock scene did not exactly give up the ghost when the storied Club Dredd, melting pot of indie bands and pretty young things wearing black at the corner of EDSA and P. Tuason in Cubao, closed shop some years ago. The proprietors, who had taken the rig from obscure Scout Tobias in Lower Timog to a more centralized location along a main highway, probably felt it was time to move on. Certainly some of the unsigned bands who first got exposure in Club Dredd might still be honing their chops in a garage somewhere, who knows? Perhaps even listening to the latest Cure collection, Greatest Hits.

Greatest Hits contains 18 vital songs of the Cure, a number of them helping to define a decade. For even if the discography here spans over 20 years, or from the late ’70s to 2001, the Cure clearly hit its stride as a band in the ’80s.

So there’s Boys Don’t Cry, a song which was enough to inspire a movie years after it was first released, and In Between Days, their jangling guitars a trademark of the time, just as the Smiths and the Replacements relied on the same wall of sound.

Vocalist Robert Smith knew how to play with the varied nuances of a phrase, the better to twist its meaning in pure gothic style.

In The Walk and A Forest, the bass lines are funky and irrepressible.

Just Like Heaven features guitar work that rings in your ears. There is creative use of the wah-wah in Never Enough, from the album Mixed up. All in a day’s work for the Cure, who however found it more prudent not to include Killing an Arab in this collection for obvious reasons. Though the song may be loosely based on the Albert Camus novel The Stranger, the band’s handlers at Fiction Records may have done the right move in striking off the song which is anyway included in the Staring at the Sea album of the late ’80s.

But there is more than enough here to keep Cure and Goth rock fans occupied and happy, among the more memorable being Friday I’m in Love, Mint Car and Just Say Yes. The band’s music has held up well through the years; though they may be representative of the ’80s, the music still sounds fresh and urgent. Smith, who has been caricatured in the local gag show Bubble Gang, has that air of gentle perversity that takes the likes of Boy George one step beyond.

Another George, George Michael has of late released his latest single, Freeek!, which showcases his usual keen pop sense. Michael, who with Wham short of reinvented the pop song in the duo’s heyday, is consistent in his espousal of the straightforward tune with a patently neo-disco flavor, which in a way is the progenitor of house music.

In Freeek!, Michael proves there’s more where Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me, his best-selling duet with Elton John, came from. Though I myself have never been a great fan of Michael, pop music owes him, in the same vein but not of the magnitude the industry owes the Beach Boys. Then again, the business has been good to them.

Easily one of the most compelling singer-songwriters to emerge in years is India Arie, whose Acoustic Soul is a breath of fresh air coming from Motown way. Not since Tracy Chapman arrived in the scene in the late ‘80s has there been as exciting and as strong a debut album from an Afro-American woman; all in all, there’s not a weak cut in the CD.

India Arie pays tribute where it is due, and mentions Marvin Gaye, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others, but it is in the last cut, Wonderful, where she lets it all hang out in her salute to Stevie Wonder, who unlike the aforementioned musicians is still very much alive.

The song Wonderful is such that Stevie Wonder himself could have written and sung it. One would almost have to do a double take on the credits to find out if he didn’t in fact play a cameo of some sort, his influence stamped all over down to Arie’s soulful phrasing.

In Video, Arie shows why she’s not your usual run-of-the-mill artist in the young millennium, and that armed only with a guitar she can write songs of subtle magic.

Brown Skin and Back in the Middle are standard compositions that rely heavily on the bass, the soundscape littered with nuggets of funky wisdom.

The lady’s got soul, and as an old bard once said, what else can you do but inspire people?