The Bloomfields

Unlike the Eraserheads, who were merely influenced by the Beatles, the Bloomfields are an unabashed Beatles fan-band. They dress in jackets and ties and wear their hair in Fab Four mops. Their sound consists of giving a variety of songs, from the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" to Tito Vic & Joey's "Iskul Bukol," the Beatles treatment. To these guys, every song is a Beatles song.

I like the Bloomfields' music, and I like the Bloomfields' attitude. I can't begin to describe how sick I am of the navel-gazing, "I'm an ahhh-tist" vibe I get from a lot of Pinoy rockers: they can't just make music, they have to have a philosophy about it. Whatever happened to having fun and making people happy? Many of these guys aren't even that good. And many of them still live with their parents, eat their meals off their parents' tables, drive to their gigs in their parents' cars, and pay for their gas with their parents' money. Yes, folks, these are the people who consider themselves more real than those of us who care about money and work for a living. Like the hilarious Jack Black character in School Of Rock, they think they serve society by rocking, and they think that's enough.

But, back to the music. I like the Bloomfields' sound: it's fresh and clean. These boys are troupers, taking their Beatles fanhood to its logical extreme and doing it well. Most important, their music is fun. They're just having fun. The kind of fun you would have if you felt like singing some karaoke and you happened to have a good voice, and your friends were good at guitars, keyboards, and drums and decided to accompany your singing, and you all had a chance to polish up your sound and put it on a CD with a flower on it--that's the kind of fun the Bloomfields are having with their self-titled debut album, launched on March 23, 2007.

My introduction to the Bloomfields' music befits their un-snobbish vibe: I discovered them through my extremely un-rocker ten-year-old cousin, who went to the album launch to squeal at the "cute" band members. (And they are cute, in a beau-laid sort of way.) I had no doubt that this was a good band, as most bands who get to the album-launch stage are, but I was surprised at how much fun I had listening to their album. I keep repeating that word--fun--because that's really what music is about! Enough of the puerile brooding of pampered twentysomethings toting glossy Fenders and candy-colored iBooks. As Tom Shone writes on Slate.com, "The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic 'difficulty' or 'self-consciousness.' Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching The Incredibles."

In addition to the aforementioned "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "Iskul Bukol" (renditions both vigorous and loving), the Bloomfields' debut album includes a few mild surprises: bossa nova standard "Girl From Ipanema," Andrew Gold's well-loved "Never Let Her Slip Away," Dionne Warwick's signature song "Walk On By," and the Richard Reynoso hit of yore, "Ale." Two bluesy 50s songs, "At The Hop" and "King Creole," root this band's sound in a tradition even older than John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but of course the album includes two Beatles covers, "If I Fell" and "You're Gonna Lose That Girl," both performed with great gusto and a sort of touching fidelity. Of the original songs on the album, my favorite is "Wala Nang Iba," which I listened to for the first time with a feeling of revelation. It reminds me of a scene in the terrific TV show Scrubs where amateurs perform "Eight Days A Week" at a wedding, and everyone glides onto the ballroom floor and dances up a storm. "Wala Nang Iba" is that kind of song: merry and cool, a song people can dance to at a wedding, a song people can have fun to.

Yes, I know. Fun fun fun. It's all I really care about. The Bloomfields seem to care about fun too, and that's why people are going to connect to them more than to those ridiculous musicians who claim to be all about "the real world." You know, living in Ayala Alabang and spending more money on your T-shirts than many Filipino families spend on food--that's the real world, man!