THE CITIZEN ON MARS

When I was just new to being a music lover, like really being into music, sometime just after my high school days, I had a thought then that I didn’t have much interest in dance music. Not that I were just being typical of most rock music lovers, who shows no restraint at all in showing (off) their contempt for “dance” music, like it was only for sissies and phonies. In fact I could like them so well in the past. When I was a very young kid, like somewhere between 8 or 10 years old, I had often jibed and feel the beat of songs like “Brother Louie” or “Tarzan Boy” being played in game arcades that I had frequented then.

Perhaps, it was my great leaning to New Wave that had somehow made Petshop Boys reasonably chic and modish.

Or perhaps, Depeche Mode was really a dance band when they started making music in the mid-80’s that we countless millions of soul who had loved them in their early days really and actually had loved dance music, without us knowing it.

One day, about several months ago, I passed by my favorite video rental store and got hold of the tribute concert video to Leonard Cohen titled “I’m Your Man” , and I just got blown by it. It was a very good concert video/musical, and could be just second to U2’s “Rattle and Hum”. There was this fat guy in that show who just appeared on stage and sang Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will” and I thought it was a fabulous number, the way the fat guy sang it was so terrifyingly haunting that I kept on watching that part of the concert over and over again.

The thing is - I never knew the name of the fat guy even if I had gotten so interested with his so enchanting voice. But I tried searching in the net and I later found out that his name was in fact Antony Hegarty. I thought that I liked to hear most of his song and wondered if ever he had some works before and truth to be told, indeed he was in a band, two of them in fact, Antony Johnson and the Aeons and Hercules and Love Affair.

This was how I discovered the sumptuous and wonderfully-crafted album Hercules and Love Affair, the self-titled debut album from the band with the same name.

The album is a dance album that’s why I was having some soliloquy about dance music in the beginning part of this post.
Now I wonder if finally, dance music is just as pleasurable as rock music. I wonder even if dance music is finally making a huge comeback, back to its heydays in the 80’s.

And for a dance band, Hercules and Love Affair’s album is so seriously wonderful and lyrically emotional that it was not like any other dance album that I’ve got ever known of.

In the beginning song “Time Will”, Antony Hegarty sang “Don’t Lie to me. Don’t Make it Up… I cannot hold half a life.” Now that’s just an emotional outbreak that just got me so wedged with this album.

In “Blind”, the band showed exceptional liveliness with a very jibing bass intro that makes the body move effortlessly and being so caught up by the ever so melodic vocals of Antony, making it one of the most original pieces of music that I have heard so recently.

And as if this wasn’t enough, the album moves on to higher ground in the extremely vigorous “Raise Me Up” with meandering lyrics that sang “They put you down. They pushed your face down. You kissed the ground.”

Naomi Ruiz also maintain vocal duties in this band and she is sometimes called “Fabulous Naomi” and the first time you hear her sing, it would be no surprise why she is called that way. Her voice is smooth and flowing like a crystal afloat an ice field, that in “Iris” and “Athene” she just turned the songs into full bloom naturally. She immediately reminds the listener of EBTG’s Tracy Thorn, so confident in voice and one who needs no vocal acrobatics whatsoever.

Almost every song in the album is as catchy as a fresh rainbow, almost all. It’s a being rare that way. Every song in it could actually be played on FM radio and that’s ultimate radio-friendliness that doesn’t happen every day.

Rating : 9/10