The Flesh Happening
The Flesh Happening CD
(TFH)

Anal Joy. Shit On Me. The De Sade Suite. Bleed. These are the songtitles on Flesh Happening’s CD they sent over to me over five months ago. Yup. I’ve been sitting on those review CDs again; but let not lose ourselves over my predilection for classic Melayu procrastination, Flesh Happening is a top band and it’s my duty to convert all of you readers into blathering worshippers.

About six months ago, I came across The Flesh Happening’s website. I listened to their song Kamikaze and immediately felt this sense of joy and utmost exhilaration. I wanted more and boy, I was lucky. The site was offering anyone who would write a free promo CD, that is if that anyone would send a picture of his or her “rude bits”.

Being a shy Melayu boy, I offered that I don’t have a digital camera and so I can’t send them a picture of my thick, 12 inch schlong. But I like their music anyway and would love to do a smashing review.

Mainman & singer Oliva Spleen was kind enough to overlook my lack of sporting spirit and sent over the CD about a week later. I’ve been listening to it since, five brittle songs of sex, submission, self-loathing and depravity. What more would a lazy Melayu boy wants?

Kamikaze opens up this CD and listening to it now again, I happy to say that it stays as brittle as I first heard it. Imagine if you please, post-punk Britain 1978/79. Gang of Four, Magazine, Wire and The Fall, bands who were getting sick of the three-chords, faster-faster punk rock norm and decided to do their own take on it, a sprinkle of art school minimalist cool, a dash of angular sensibility and a course away form the usual rock’n'roll rhythm’n'blues-based straight-jacket.

These past few years we have seen a rather exciting return to post-punk sensibilities by many combos in the west and the “fever” is slowly affecting the locals, especially with bands like Singapore’s Destroy All Monsters (top band!) and our own Killeur Calculateur (which is good, albeit a bit tempted by math-rock).

To my dismay though, most of the Western “neu-post-punk” bands don’t feature much “angry” spitting and skewered tones as I would like. They spout influences such as Gang of Four but where’s the strikingly pissed-off jagged guitars eh? The politics spouted by the old punks of yore is also jettisoned in favour of mundane personal upheavals. I don’t like that.

In short, The Flesh Happening is one of the rare few that have taken up the spirit of it all pretty much intact, turning it fresh but without losing the energy, the danger and the confrontational vigour. I like that, and I like that a lot! Carrying on the original tradition of punk rockers who were too literate for simplistic rock’n'roll and shallow sloganeering, The Flesh Happening employs shock-tactics and guerilla performance art, with Oliva performing buck naked, taunting the crowd and all that.

Lyrically, it’s all Sodom and Gomorrah, Marquis de Sade and Rimbaud; total abandon upon the altars of debauchery and perversity. I can’t help thinking what happens if there’s a band like The Flesh Happening right now and here in Boleh-land. Probably skewered and hung high upon huge and bloodied stakes of public morality, or at least, confined somewhere in a rehab. Religious rehab that is.

myspace.com/thefleshhappening
thefleshhappening.com

Listen!
Bleed by The Flesh Happening