But Hazel Diez, who also plays bass for the band, can also bear echoes of Martha Davis of the Motels, Rickie Lee Jones, even Lolit Carbon. That same voice veering into her own through other cuts sampled that night over isaw and beer, the Imelda Papin chestnut, Bakit?, the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, as well the old jazz standard Summertime. "Nafake-an ako ro’n a," I confess to my companion, the band’s keyboardist and musical arranger, Rinky Munoz. There are too slashes of thunder and lightning amid the downpour in Crying in the Rain, as Rinky himself advised us to watch out for in the swirl of tropical baroque adaptation that would easily fit in along with the six Diez originals.
Drums, we were told, were strictly session, in this case Jun Regalado, drummer for hire when the initial drummer couldn’t hack it, in fact Honeyrush drummers are employed mostly on a gig to gig basis. When was it that Eleanor Rigby was a brooding moody song, here transformed somewhat into a semi-jazz, Fleetwood Mac popish outing, complete with the rice grains left to be picked up one by one on the church steps. You can imagine the Honeyrush members picking up the rice grains, as they go through this remake. Rinky later left a CD of the second extant copy of the Honeyrush debut, this time with Chuck Eribal overdubbing the guitar parts in place of the work of the nameless first guitarist. And here the comparisons start. To tell the truth I had been apprehensive if Eribal could measure up if not approximate the prior recording, which cooked and smoked and impressively left us in its breathless wake. Especially the solo in Bakit?, which expression was reminiscent of Ysagani Ybarra, bakit?, this in a singsong manner. The second master was on the whole clearer, and from which Eribal’s work could be judged in its entirety, with a bonus cut too in Sayang. We couldn’t help but wonder if a version of the Didith Reyes classic Nananabik wasn’t in store, it is difficult to second-guess the mind of the musical Svengali of Muñoz market. Who texted us – Rinky that is – that Eribal was basically restrained in his guitar runs, pigil, "because of the nature of the song."
Offhand we could say that Eribal relies less on velocity and frenetic intensity than on dynamics, tone and deliberately oblique scales. The two guitarists are in fact studies in contrast, with Eribal – who used to be in Rinky’s old band Elizabeth Reed – coming out with the more persevering because less flashy performance. As for Diez, her six originals show much promise, with full of double entendres and stoking the fires of social controversy.
She definitely has a sound songwriting sense, and her bass playing is competently inspired, while her voice is waiting on the fringes of a newfound hurt and bittersweetness. Again Rinky texted the following:
Where Are Your Promises is a poke at the Catholic church and its priests. Brand New Hall is about death and a cemetery. Patak is about our favorite herb, which does not like the rainy season. And the rest of the origs, he says, pretty much mean what they say. The studio shot of the band has the male members gathered around a seated Hazel, who looks like a tall and handsome young woman. It also pictures the band’s more or less regular drummer, Darwin Eustaquio, which before this rush for honey seemed content with being named after the origin of the species. Hazel is wearing a green blouse and an altogether toothy smile.
We don’t know which is Darwin and which Eribal, but the wrinkled rastaman is somewhere near the center of the picture, grinning from ear to ear. Lately we heard the band has been signed up to be among Dyna Recording’s stable of acts in 2004, and the debut CD to be released in midyear if not midstream of our brave new world: from Saturday cabaret nights at Jules on Makati Ave. late last year, and back to the obscure Tunesmith café with our names written on some unconsumed beer bottles.