Passport to Fame - by Oxy

WAZZUP Y'ALLS! 

Damn I miss blogging. 

Couple of days ago I asked Oxy to do a guest post for this blog since I have nothin 'musical' enough to write about and she agreed! Oh by the way, Oxy was in the same band with me back in college *WE'RE NOT THAT OLD, OKAY!?* as you may have read in most of my posts, she's LEGIT.

She told me about this competition she went to so here it goes~

p.s: stuff in green r my jabbers.

Hello everyone!

It's my first time being someone's blog's guest writer! Yoohoo..

I am Lina *her real name* , I had not enjoyed live band performance for so long, until 14 March 2013, when suddenly my long lost friends aka Banana Junkies *TMG and JLT belong to this band too~* brought me to see a battle of the bands gig.

Little that I know about this gig, but PassportToFame is basically a battle of the bands where participants are required to travel to a few cities to perform and show their talents.

It is in Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Johor for the first, second and third auditions respectively. The gig that I attended was in Penang.

My long lost friends performed earlier (when I was occupied with work) so I didn’t see them rocking the stage. But I’m sure they were. Well, at least I saw the videos.

That night, I watched 3 bands and that’s enough to make my day. I was stunned, especially with the second band. They are ‘Epy&Ardiv’ , 7-piece band, consisting of sax, trumpet, drum, keyboard, guitar, bass and vocal. They played 3 songs, each with groovy reggae genre. The first song was ‘fly me to the moon’ and it was fiuhhh. I’ve listened to a few versions of the song and I could tell ya that they really really did a great job with their arrangement. The second song was an Indonesian song titled ‘BidadariManisku’. I think I never listened to this song before (or maybe I listened but I forgot) but they again really made music out of it. The last song was their original song titled ‘Teman’, with groovy beats. It was worth watching!

Overall, you can feel the oomph drum beats and bass lines, wonderful melodies from the trumpet, sax and keyboard, great guitar strumming and also good vocal. It was all the combination of skills, groove and showmanship. I was entertained!

It’s time for the judges to say some words. “You’re my favourite drummer”, one said. “The original song full mark, music full mark, performance full mark, congratz you guys have set the standard. It’s time for you guys to establish your identity. Checkered pattern shirts, probably with the hats”. Another judge said “The vocal needs some improvement”.

Yeah there is always a room for improvement. From my side, the keyboardist, sax and trumpet need to show more showmanship. It is also good to practice endurance especially for the vocalist, sax and trumpet as their volume was a bit softer during the third song. Lastly, I can’t hear what the guitarist said, during the introduction and also between the songs…so I believe he needs to work on that.

That’s all. Ciao!

Thanks for the guest post, Oxy!! 

Well, we may not be as -to be taken with LOTS OF SALT- "cool" as we were back in college, but some things remain the same. We still have the ears to tell if one is a quality music or not. 

Have a good day ;)