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The Black Christmas Concert is less than two weeks away! You can still get tickets for the December 10 Eastwood concert by calling Ticketnet at 911-5555.

Despite growing up and listening to OPM rock in the 90s, I wasn’t exactly caught in the reverie around the Eraserheads reunion. Though its undeniable that the Eraserheads were the single biggest rock act in the entire decade, the brand of music that Adoro, Buendia, Marasigan and Zabala permeated the airwaves blurred the boundaries  of rock and pop. This enabled the band to straddle artistic authority and overwhelming critical and commercial success.

But some people just want music to be a little bit more hard-hitting. Sure, catchy melodies and relateable lyrics are a tried-and-tested formula in making a chart-topper but for a generation that was fresh off listening to bootleg cassettes of Metallica and Nirvana, the aforementioned technique just wouldn’t cut it. There were a considerable number of heavy acts that preceded Wolfgang but the impact that the band had as a hard rock quarter is beyond reproach. They made hard rock marketable. A lot of people still found the music to be loud but a considerable number banded around the music and stamped their generation’s mark all over it.

A Wolfgang concert is one of the most amazing experiences that one could have as far as OPM goes. You can literally hear 90% of the audience just singing at the top of their lungs. It doesn’t matter whether the song is a radio single or some bonus track, for some reason, the people who attend concerts just know the  lyrics by heart. I haven’t been to any concert where I’ve seen such dedication from fans. It’s a physical experience as well for most people. You just can’t help but feel the music and channel the energy to your neck and extremities.

Before their relatively low-key disbandment of sorts in 2002, Wolfgang was able rack up five studio albums and one live acoustic album at the turn of the millennium.

For this series, we’ll be dealing with the first (and for a considerable number of fans – the best) album -Wolfgang.

Album Name: Wolfgang

Release Date: 1995

1. “Arise” (4:24)
2. “Halik Ni Hudas” (“Judas’ Kiss”) (3:35)
3. “What Grows In Your Garden” (4:37)
4. “As Oceans” (5:27)
5. “Cast Of Clowns” (3:48)
6. “Natutulog Kong Mundo” (“My Sleeping World”) (5:05)
7. “Left Alone” (3:10)
8. “Darkness Fell” (5:29)

After being impressed with two demo tracks, the execs at Ivory Records snapped up Wolfgang and signed  them to a record contract. For their first album, the band surely didn’t disappoint. The eponymous album is one of the most solid pieces of work by any band from the Philippines. It shows great range in terms of music (the punishing pace of “Arise” to the slow and melancholic “Cast of Clowns”) and emotions (from human hypocrisy and betrayal in “Halik Ni Hudas” to the almost fantasy/tragedy-driven “Darkness Fell”). It truly is one of the albums that you can listen to from beginning to end without skipping tracks.

It’s very hard  to pick the strongest track out of the eight in this album. There’s a reason to like each track for completely different reasons.

Of course, this more-than-a-decade-old album is no longer available in record stores.

Ivory released the exact same album in 2001 as part of their Legends series. It doesn’t have the same album art but the music is still the same. This album is still very much available.

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