Your new favorite easy-listening record of difficult emotional truths. And you can dance to it.
Drop everything, indie boys and girls. Paper Satellites just dropped your favorite EP today. You don’t know it yet, but it’s That Kind of Record: it’s the one that changes your mind about what you think you like or love.
In fact, ‘Onodera’ – the EP in question – doesn’t even concern your mind and its purported contents. It’s visceral, but not in the usual way people call music visceral. Unlike seething, frothing-at-the-mouth, triple-time rockers, ‘Onodera’ is decidedly affable, but not without teeth. It just has you humming, desk-drumming, and (Jesus H. Christ) swaying right off the bat.
‘Manila Meltdown’ from 2022 was cool, yes, but much like the band’s then-bias for the “club” bands (Bombay Bicycle Club, Two Door Cinema Club), its potency is a fleeting romance: the fondness will always be there, but so will its musical predictabilities and inevitabilities.
‘Onodera’ – the EP in question that’s just dropped – is like a girl who’s convinced you to dance, and she didn’t even have to do a whole sales pitch. You just go, willingly getting yourself dragged by the hand.
You, a steadfast stalwart of sitting still, confronted by an undeniable impulse-shifter, now hitting the dancefloor with a total stranger, as though dancefloors and total strangers weren’t previously at the top of your list of things to skip vigorously.
Thematically, it’s a record of hearty highs and lonesome lows, and the vast, confusing gulf in between. “It’s about being intensely and passionately in love with someone or something, being severely hurt by expectations, and [accepting that some things are beyond our control],” the band says in an advance release, quipping that it’s basically “the electro-indie pop version of ‘(500) Days of Summer’.”
There is a shiny-and-new quality to the tunes on ‘Onodera,’ thanks in no small measure to the contributions of Leone Requilman (a.k.a. BABYBLUE, also the drummer for the brilliant Galaxy Lodge) on producer detail (on top of synths and samples). Jyle Macalintal’s vocal work remains distinct – and so do the instrumentation and arrangements via bassist Paulo Carpio, drummer Aaron Escueta, and guitarist-synths guy Martin Cruz – but BABYBLUE has sprinkled bacon bits on the salad, if you catch my drift.
“[This EP] serves as an exercise for us to branch out into previously uncharted territories,” the band adds, explaining how ‘Onodera’ also coincides with a string of firsts: it’s Paper Satellites’ first longform collab, their first all-Filipino-language record, first (to use the present-day, post-COVID parlance) fully-WFH collection.
And there’s much to love in this compact assemblage.
Opening titular track “Onodera” is an elegant pastiche that swells into an emotional snowball. Personal favorite “Alipin” has strains of Minus the Bear crossed with Autotelic-like melodies, a handsome template for this easy-listening record of difficult emotional truths.
Previous single “Dapithapon” is an infinitely singable bop vaguely reminiscent of more understated numbers by Baths and Modulogeek. “Dama,” meanwhile, is replete with dizzying, unrelenting sword-fighting arpeggios, a sumptuous marriage of melody and prosody.
Lastly, as for projected central single “Paggising,” it rolls out as a dance track because it is a dance track: the sound of a comedown that follows a heady night of drowning out a letdown.
I can’t stress enough how much I dug this, and I can rarely something that black-and-white.