Make Out Music Nowadays

It's the end of an era. College kids no longer make out to chillout.

I spotted the band doing a huddle before a set in Saguijo. Their shoulders were and arms were interlocked. Their heads bowed as if in prayer, mumbling something and motivating themselves as though they’re the first five in an Ateneo-La Salle encounter.

There’s not one of them looking like a hipster and when they straightened up, they had that unmistakable, lanky teenage built. Whether it's the tight-fit Lacoste polo shirts or lose-cut pants, whether it’s the skin-pounder’s haircut, the vocalist’s big curly hair, they all end up looking like they can eat double cheeseburgers everyday for breakfast without gaining so much as a pound. And they must be channeling all that lanky teenager, double-cheeseburger energy somewhere. They must be getting a lot. I’m spelling it out, but it could have been the same reason why they call themselves Musical O.

There’s an obvious suggestion in the band’s name, which wonderfully enough – they don’t blatantly cry out in their music. The suggestion they make in their music is fine-tuned and artfully coiled. It’s one that takes some, in Schopenhauerian sense of the phrase - aesthetic contemplation.

Young as they are (and this being their debut album), it sounds parallel to a first experience of, or of a series of memories of the first time of something. This is what I figured out when I aesthetically contemplated Musical O.

Those guitar strings and faint voice start off like the soft bubbles of saliva, simmering in the summer heat, slowly exchanged in the couch. Although the music is clean and the message is clear. They are trying to appear experienced although they obviously don’t have it yet. And that can only be good: music from impressionable young kids with a musical experience that is either untouched or undiluted yet nonetheless talented. It’s honest creativity experimenting, and in a teenage world where everything was exclusively real and good. In itself, the rawness of their real talent is innovating.

This didn't come out in their sucky lyrics (which is all there is to say about it), but in the secret language of very young people, you either understand now, or once understood, what it’s thinly suggesting. It reminds you of your own nature of unsuppressed urges, and when those urges are no longer suppressed something good’s coming out. It’s the suggestive, yet subtle O of this music. Whatever the fuck that means, it made us fumble for something in the bedside and later made us squirt in sensitive places.

If this is a by-product teenage angst, well or unwell, I hope it never pays off. It’s positive. Musical O – may you never get bored and old.

Boring and old me, less my face. The Musical O album is encircled in red.
(This was taken around May this year after we bought the Album at Music One GB3, and stopped for chocolate and cold coffee in a sunny afternoon at the GB5 Max Brenner.)