The Whitest Boy Alive takes Manila
MANILA, Philippines - Erlend Øye, the red-headed vocalist of Whitest Boy Alive, was a little ticked off. After their messy soundcheck on the afternoon of their concert in Manila, Erlend sat his tall frame down for an interview, and gently spoke his mind. Fresh from Taiwan, where “it seems like... once a month they have bands coming... it’s a little bit early days here still about [alternative bands.] [The Philippines is] much more confused...” he mused. “Last time,” he added, referring to this time last year when his other music act Kings of Convenience played NBC Tent, “we played in a tent that’s normally used for weddings, and now, here’s a tent that’s normally used for disco.”
That disco tent is Republiq, the enormous swanky club at the edge of the city, protected by a dress code and frequented by yuppies and foreigners, the event presented by Absolut Vodka. “I don’t know what to expect today,” Erlend said. “Do people know the music? Are they dancing? Are they just listening?”
Oh, dance we did, all us indie non-minors who were mint enough to afford both tickets and alcohol. When Erlend, Marcin, Sebastian, and Daniel all filed onstage and launched into the drum-and-bass intro of Timebomb, everybody started nodding their head as if agreeing to Erlend’s earlier statement that his “talent in life has been to start a dance floor.”
With their sparse hook-heavy dance tunes, Whitest Boy Alive could easily be written off as electronica, if not for the fact that there’s nothing electronic about them other than the Rhodes piano. And don’t make the mistake of mentioning the L-word. “It’s a big insult to us to say that [Rules] is lounge music,” Erland avers, “We’re a band that’s playing house music live, and when you hear it live, it’s so much more pumping than jazz, or lounge music.” They’re not quite techno either, but that’s where their roots lie: with Erlend’s move into Berlin and subsequent discovery of the club scene. “I never understood techno. I thought it was just ugly music for ugly people,” he laughed, “but... I discovered a scene of people who treated the music like good wine.”
Whitest Boy Alive has a German meticulousness about their sound, so their songs are simple enough to be identified when you’re bumping “Dreams or Rules” at a party where no one’s looking at a track list, but that night’s set included masterfully extended intros and outros that made the music both strange and new. The shifting arrangements made every song a version of itself: the carnivalesque Keep a Secret, the war chant of Courage, and the better-than-the-original cover of Robin S’s Show Me Love that culminated with Erlend hurling himself into the ecstatic crowd.
He would not, however, have been able to let himself go with faux ballet moves and monkey sounds if not for the rest of the band doing their band thing. Chalk it up to the possibilities that open up when chemistry is palpable. Erlend admitted that their magic is more affinity than it is talent. “If you pay attention to [Time Bomb], there’s very little happening. We’re not playing very much; what we’re doing is working together,” and he must have had the current solo-tronica artists in mind when he added, “so instead of sitting at home with a computer and making great music on your own, make the effort to make a band... It’s much more rewarding...”
Without laptops between them and the crowd, Whitest Boy Alive is attuned to the audience in ways no DJ can be, as they proved by diverting from their set list to fulfill Anne Curtis’ request for All Ears, which she achieved by holding up the sole banner in the club. “The good thing about a band like us is that maybe tonight is the best gig of our lives,” Erlend said about their knack for improvisation. “Maybe we’ll play better today than we’ve ever played before.”
He shared, “one of the most amazing things that happened in the history of Whitest Boy Alive, [at a] small show in Munich three years ago.” From onstage, he had noticed a couple in the crowd that was really feeling the music, and when he spoke to them afterward, he learned that they had just ended their 13-year relationship, but had agreed on the Whitest Boy Alive gig as their last date. “That would be my dream audience,” Erlend said, over the noisy tech preparations going on in Republiq. “The audience would only come to see the show when... in the middle of emotional crisis.”
Someone else asked him how he divides his songs between his two bands, even if the only thing those have in common is Erlend’s voice, and Erlend leaned over the table in mock seriousness. “If the song title,” he explained gravely, “starts with A, C, E, G, and so on, it’s for Whitest Boy Alive. If [it starts with] B, D, F, and H, it’s for Kings of Convenience.” Interjections of “Really?” and “Interesting!” resounded from the table. The music leaking from under the doors behind us died out, and Erlend sat back, seemingly dismayed that no one got the joke.
