I had heard once before how Sting had sang so evocatively—with all the drama and eloquence—about an ‘empire’ or ‘kingdom’, how there was such madness in passion—and great melancholy too.

But I’ve never heard even once before that there could possibly be an ‘empire’ that is not real, a fake empire that is.

The National is one band that I’ve been listening too most recently and what I’ve read about them did not prove wrong and I could say, their latest album titled “Boxer” is one great listening pleasure that one could play it over and over again and never get tired of it.

“Fake Empire” is one song that could exemplify the greatness of this album along with very evocative lyrics that get ultimately immersed into the melodies, as the song rises to it’s climactic end, with the surprising entrance and reverberation of strings and saxophone, as The National main vocalist Matt Beringer goes on repeating how he has to “hide away in a fake empire”.

How does one hides in an empire that is unreal? It escapes me the most. But with a cool band like The National, it might just as well be possible—a possibly eloquent hideaway.

Watch and listen to The National singing “Fake Empire” at The David Letterman Show.

Despite their band name—Typecast is never a stereotype except if one thinks and associates it with a very famous rock band like The Sex Pistols or Greenday, then that would be alright because the first time I got to encounter their music, I thought it was from some popular punk band from America or perhaps, Australia. And that should be a compliment.

Music critics often lauded local bands such as Hale and Cueshe to be so foreign-sounding, in a positive tone. Usually it was entirely virtuous to propel high originality in the local music scene like for example in that of The Dawn and The Eraserheads, two bands that had navigated success so well while being so Filipino in musicianship. To be so well-rooted into the nativeland’s culture is one good element for every Filipino rock band most especially.

However, in another sense of virtousity is the desire to be world-class and by this, to sound just like every successful band flying high in the international scene. For by the way, un-American bands like INXS and Coldplay was able to embrace global stardom by sounding so well like the standard rock stuff that are so patronized in America at their respective times. So why not a Filipino band to be sounding just like any other famous American rock band and be famous for it so well? Who could blame Typecast for being that?

Typecast is to me the local rock band that could might as well be the one to be described so aptly as so foreign-sounding that it becomes entirely a compliment. Like hey, “I didn’t know “Will You Ever Learn” is a song by a local band. It sounded so good I thought a foreign band sang it”.

Being foreign-sounding is not only the sole virtue of this great new Filipino band; Typecast exudes great musicianship and inflects enormous confidence; with an attitude that states out loud how they are in the scene not merely for fame and fortune but are here to rock and shake the local music scene, to wake up and instill an unknown virtue in musicality, to bring local rock music towards another level.

Typecast has great attitude and lots and lots of confidence in their music. Spunky and brave, they are.

Watch this well-made music video of Typecast’s “Will You Ever Learn“.

Note: I have reservations however about their photo take (with a semi-naked woman in the middle) in the cover of PULP magazine. I don’t subscribe to this form of imagery, I must be clear. I hope as a band they would skirt away from such outlandishness. It would be just unideal.

I was so glad I was online some moments ago that I become timely informed about a grand event scheduled this coming Sunday—Former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore and Kevin Wall of the historic Live 8 concerts are staging a similar huge musical undertaking in Live Earth where about 150 artists would be performing in venues stretching across the globe, from New Jersey to Johannesburg, in a lengthy 24 hour period.

In Live 8, rock bands like U2 and artists like Sting came forth to hark about G8’s seeming indifference to the economic havoc occuring in Africa. This time around, they’d be priming the worldwide public with global warming awareness, pronouncing to consumers around the world how they can help minimize and diminish the threat of greenhouse gasses to our environment. It would be so fascinating to see the numerous documentaries that are scheduled to be exhibited while the concert progresses.

Whether we like it or not, the effects of global warming is already being materially felt in our world today with the onset of unusual weather behavior, rising temperatures, melting polar ice, depleting rainforests and many other symptoms of a tapering environmental condition.

It’s about time to heed the call of the times. It’s about time that we become palpably aware of the ruminations of our environment. It’s about time we should listen to the murmurs of our Planet Earth—for as they say, we only have one Earth and none other.

I have not become so particular aware about the exact schedule of the Live Earth concert and the local television station that would carry it. Since the concerts are slated Saturday in the states, it would be Sunday morning here. Last time around, Studio 23 carried the lengthy and highly-enjoyable Live 8 concerts and it might similarly bring Live Earth to our shore this time. For those who have high-speed connections, MNSBC would be streaming it live straight to your monitors.

See you at the concert.

4th of July in America and Paris Hilton is in the headlines. How surreal and entirely dramatic the situation is. In this very significant day for Americans, Paris Hilton post a message in her MySpace blog and everyone suddenly listens. You’d wonder what she have to impart to the population and I thought it might just yet another controversial quip about her long-running feuds with other Hollywood teen stars. But it wasn’t. She said that everyone shouldn’t “drink and drive” and to be responsible enough to have a driver. I read further into this news and I was expecting that there’d be a catch to it, like she’s just mocking the Los Angeles traffic authorities. I later realized that she wasn’t being foolhardy this time. And this message is so worthwhile considering that vehicular accidents takes away about 1.2 million deaths worldwide annually according to World Health Organization statistics.

Ms. Paris Hilton did have a very worthwhile message to the public on Independence Day and if many had found this a little unusual, well I do not blame them. I too did found it entirely unexpected, coming from a rich man’s daughter who loves to party all the time and one who had frequent brushes with controversy for her atypical conduct.

Sexymom of the The D-Spot had most recently blogged how she adored Paris Hilton. She had expected her readers to be a little surprised and honestly I felt a little bit like that after reading that particular article by Sexymom.

Despite of it all, Sexymom could just be right for her sympathy to a very young women borne to extraordinary riches and a glittery culture where every bizarre happening could possibly happen, and even be bound to happen anyway, just like the sun going up and going down from the horizon. Ms. Hilton could have been trapped within a swirling way of life that only the unusual thrives and the simple-minded perish—like in a dog-eat-dog world. She might just be exemplifying the cruel world that she lives in and now she’s crying out to the whole world.

Maybe like the news about her “finding God” while being incarcerated for two weeks inside a Los Angeles cell, Ms. Hilton had finally found redemption and realizes that it is really not ideal to live such a self-indulgent lifestyle that in the end, there is no virtue to it and that the only way to go is to have changes—changes for the better.

This time, Ms. Hilton might just mean it and despite that I am not really into her celebrity or a fan of her of some sort, I’d be crossing my fingers for that. She could be a very effective agent for change to our youth—to propel the idea of responsibility in the youth rather than the decadent individual that she had somehow exemplified in the past.

What’s with Mr. Alec Baldwin? I have been seeing him for a number of times now in the weekend show “Saturday Night Live” and I thought it was merely a passing thing for him for afterall he is (or was) a serious actor first and foremost—or even an action movie starrer as Jack Ryan in Tom Clancy’s superthriller “Hunt For Red October” (who could forget that).

Yet now he seems to be a regular already in the abovementioned show together with Steve Martin and Martin Short. Not that it is entirely unthinkable for Mr. Baldwin to be funny sometimes and be in a comedy show but it is just that I could not seem to well-absorb the idea of him being a television comedian in the likes of Jerry Seinfeld or Ray Romano. But there he was there making funny antics on that weekend comedy show and you know what, he seems to be so good at it that I wonder if I would ever be able to see him in any other light except for a very good and very funny comedian—like he is now. He used to be a drama actor, ain’t he? The guy in “Nuremberg” and “Beetle Juice” ?

So by the way, I got so cracked up laughing at tonight’s episode of “Saturday Night Live” where Mr. Baldwin did a very good imitation of the singing super idol Tony Bennett and my oh my, he was so good at it that he could even closely imitate Mr. Bennet’s inimitable and entirely original voice—that loud husky voice that is like no other.

I am a huge Frank Sinatra follower but whenever I hear the very unique singing prowess of Tony Bennett, I become of double-mind; who is better of the two? Who is better than whom? Although the man they call the Old Blue Eye is still best for me among male crooners.

I first got to hear about Tony Bennett about the time when I was still so fresh out of college from Ateneo de Zamboanga and got hired as a TV reporter for the ABC 5 channel affiliate here. One day, while loitering around the TV station’s premises, I got to meet a couple of very young lady DJ’s and the two had asked me (out of nowhere it had seem) where I was going or what was I up to at that time. In my mind I had thought then that they were overly friendly when I had not even been formally introduced to them previously and I was feeling so uncomfortable.

But being so gentlemanly that I was supposed to be, I smiled back at them and told them perfunctorily that I was planning to hie-off to a nearby record store and buy some music. What album (we don’t call it CD back then) am I planning to score they asked me. I told them that I have nothing particular in mind at that moment but I just see when I get there. Both ladies said that they could come with me and advise me on what to buy (being DJ’s that they were, they should know better ika nga). Not wanting to disappoint them and be misunderstood, I said why not. But in my mind I thought “geezzzz, I ain’t really comfortable with this, buying records with two people I barely know”. It used to be that buying records is some sort of a personal ritual for me, scouring around the stacks of records so slowly and being able to examine the music available in a time of my own, and not be hurried and be able to think for myself.

So to make the story short, they had egged me (more like trapped me) into buying a Tony Bennett album, an MTV unplugged record of the old crooner if I remember correctly. Back then, I was more into rock and roll or new wave kind of music that when I got home, I was feeling a little disgusted that I had to be so polite and had to buy some music of some old famous guy.

But after listening to Tony Bennett for some time, I felt that his voice was just magical and now as I remember that day when two virtual unknowns came to me and offered to become music advisers, I could perhaps thank those two young DJ’s for introducing me to the oh so wonderful sound and voice of Tony Bennet.

I know you’ll like him and his music—it is just wonderful and sublime.

See Mr. Tony Bennett sing the song he is so famous for, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” here.

Arcade Fire—seems to me like the safest name for a band, especially for a new-wave rock group. It is so gothic sounding even while gothic music is not anymore in vogue these days.

And yet Arcade Fire is making waves in the music scene like a comet on a clear evening sky; that despite of it being merely an upstart band, it had already garnered for itself a Grammy award nomination. That’s an achievement that is hard to follow for any new indie rock band. This ethereal group was formed in the middle of 2003 in Montreal, Quebec and had a debut album titled Funeral which went to become a sleeper hit and was in fact considered an internet phenomenon after getting sold sizably online, following an excellent 9.7 critic rating from Pitchfork.

The first time I had encountered the music of Arcade Fire, I had felt intense familiarity with it as if I had already known them for so long. But the truth is, Arcade Fire is just a new band even though they are playing like refined veterans—with unparalleled intensity and attitude, and a steady no-care-what-the-critics-say rocker gait.

Their music is quite familiar in a sense that it can easily be taken in without any hint of protest from the listening side. Yet the melodies in their songs are so innovative that they are completely original. I do not know exactly if such circumstance could be possible or such combination be reasonably realistic but that’s just how I feel about them. Perhaps, this is the main reason why I had adored Arcade Fire in an instant, where aside from The Fray’s hit singles (How To Save A Life, Over My Head), it is their latest album Neon Bible that is so heavy on my rotation, especially on afternoons in the backyard, sipping smoldering coffee and reading a fresh book or tuning in to the early evening news.

I could well remember the days when the Psychedelic Furs were riding up so high, that listening to Arcade Fire has that same experience I have gotten then; as Richard Butler filled my college years with his heavenly groans singing Pretty In Pink and Ghost In You. This may just altogether be a sign that there is still hope for new wave resurrection, even if many thought that new wave is completely dead. This may also be a hint that the rock music scene could still afford to do some backward steps, to the days when music was an entirely effective form of social expression (of angst and rebellion sometimes); in order to forward whole opinions and forceful digressions; as music then was such a significant means to important aims or objectives.

Arcade Fire’s lyrics are strong and unrelenting; clearly uncompromising and that’s why listening to them for the first time is akin to meeting a long lost friend after a very long and ardous journey from afar, traveling back to the days when bands like U2 and The Smiths was still as outspoken as a dead poet or to that momentous year when a seemingly roguish upstart band from Seattle named Pearl Jam released the very strong and heavy Ten album—a musical work that was filled with stark realism that it resembles what Fyodor Dostoyevsky would have made if he was a modern rock superstar.

In Windowsill, “Don’t wanna live in my father’s house no more Don’t wanna fight in a holy war Don’t want the salesmen knocking at my door I don’t wanna live in America no more…Don’t wanna sit in the windowsill no more…; that’s how strong their opinions can become and so ultimately frank and honest.

And in Crown of Love, the band’s lead-singer and songwriter Win Butler sings, “They say it fades if you let it, love was made to forget it. I carved your name across my eyelids, you pray for rain i pray for blindness. if you still want me, please forgive me, the crown of love is not upon me…” . The emotions gets so high towards the end of this song that in the background, one can hear a cruel violin, feint but insisting, to pursue a lost emotion.

This band has such powerful music, and so affecting lyrics.

Musically, Arcade Fire blows the listener away with crisp instrumentality; combining ethereal digital sounds with the tender sounds of classical instruments like the violin and cello. Half the time—in their livelier pieces—an upbeat bass sound reverberates like a war chant and puts liveliness into the air only the likes of Bruce Springsteen and the Rollingstones could provide previously.

And I could not help but be reminded of the excellent Australian band Midnight Oil , the group that had the historic Diesel And Dust album released in 1989. Win Butler vocals sounds so much like Pete Garrett of Midnight Oil and that’s a good thing since the Aussie band’s distinctive vocal have been often imitated by many bands in the 90’s but clearly never equaled. Perhaps Win Butler is Garrett’s worthy heir apparent.

Arcade Fire should by all sense be the next big thing in the rock music scene. This Canadian band is riding high on the crest of its initial success—both critically and financially—and they only have their superb brand of music to thank for. They have been to the David Letterman show, they have been interviewed by BBC, and they have already appeared on Time Magazine’s front cover. Success is printed all over them in bold capital letters.

Listen to samples of Arcade Fire’s music on Last FM.

Listen now to the single “Crown of Love” from their 1994 Funeral album: