The Smatter With You Is...

Fortunately, Luis, my outdated Mac at work has hundreds upon hundreds of archived reviews, dating back to 2002. A quick search for the ones you mentioned turned up these wonderfully caustic bits:

from a review of
DIRTY KITCHEN
(Demo)
"Ride" is a surrealist art house sort of song, borrowing Beck's (and Kurt Cobain's) weirdo lyricist dunce cap, patching together words and phrases that sound nice and rhyme together, but don't actually mean or say anything of consequence, like talking to an idiot savant, although in this case more idiot than savant. It's unobtrusive make-out music more than anything else. --Jun Krus na Ligas (date unknown)

from a review of
JOYCE JIMENEZ
Private Joyce: The Videoke Collection
How the hell do you review a bunch of videoke CDs? my mind reeled as I lurched home. Should I criticize the song selection? What about the quality of the background music itself? Should I judge the visuals by how well they fit the songs? (How?) Furthermore, since this series was obviously banking on Joyce Jimenez's sex appeal, should I dish out higher marks for hotness of concept? For sheer bare-assedness? And did you know, by the way, that if you run a Google search for the phrase "videoke review,” Google will inform you that "Your search did not match any documents"? Nothing. Nada. Zip. This is the World Wide Web we're talking about here, people -- a vast repository of useless information where the phrase "CD review" turns up well over 200,000 matches, and even such unlikely word combinations as, say, "fat supermodel" or "duck fucking" (yes, duck fucking) will yield in the vicinity of 200 results each.--Luis Katigbak, July 2003 issue

from a review of
RIVERMAYA
Between the Stars and Waves

Frankly, I don’t know what to do with Between the Stars and Waves, because the truth is that it really is a very good album, and I immensely enjoyed a lot of it -- but also spent the same time wanting very much to hurl the CD out of the window and go out to punch the living daylights out of the band ... It’s ridiculous. On the album’s first single, “A Love to Share,” Rico Blanco out-Coldplays even Chris Martin, singing in an indefinable accent -- imagine a Pinoy singing like he thinks an Englishman might sing if he were trying to sound not-too-British. That annoying affectation pervades the entire album, unfortunately, and it’s what makes the album less a tribute than a pastiche.--Kristine Fonacier, December 2003 issue

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Now, onto better things.

Lest people think that we're one of those people who disguise their lack of real talent with snarkiness (and there are many; like Luis said, "Why are so many smart people idiots?"), I'd like to post this excerpt from Luis' cover story on the Dawn, out this month. Very nice. I'm proud to have had our bylines share space in a magazine, my friend:

I can hear the song from the street, from two stories down and a set of doors away: Live and be, love will set us free... I seethe with impatience as the doorman checks me for weapons, hastily fork over the club's entrance fee, and then I'm inside, going upstairs two at a time, and the music fills my head and I ascend into a space of black-painted walls and colored lights and see the band onstage. The full force of a song almost twenty years old hits me -- and all of a sudden, I am half there, somewhere else.

I was twelve when I first watched The Dawn live in concert, at the tail end of the 80s. They weren't the headliners of the Ultra Storm, hard as that may be to believe now: that distinction belonged to currently obscure band The Rage, as a glance at an old ticket stub proves. But in my memory, The Dawn was the only reason we were there, my cousins and I--the reason why we pushed our way through the close-packed crowd to get as near the stage as possible, to shout and sing along at the top of our lungs. In my memory, songs like "Enveloped Ideas" and "Dreams" were all part of a story I was living out with people my age, friends and strangers alike: seemingly trivial yet unforgettable, a story of discovery and self-definition and mind-challenging music.

You find your music like you find anything you love for a lifetime: through head-spinningly intense first impressions, deepened by increments, by glances and tastes, flashes of bliss, the slow rush, the terrifying exhilaration of knowing and being known, and finally: hands and heart clasped in commitment, days and years sealed against decay. The beauty of a cascading guitar line, of a voice in flight singing words that mean something to you--these are permanent and ephemeral, as are everything that matters, and when you first fall for your music you almost never appreciate the paradox.

from "The Dawn: Everything that Matters",
by Luis Katigbak,
PULP, March 2005