It’s eleven o’ clock on a Saturday night, and a palpable anticipation for the last band hangs in the air. The people seem to know that they’re about to witness something explosive.
Due to a double-booking error, this year’s Rites of Passage doesn’t take place at Mow’s, but on the third floor of the Kowloon House along Matalino Street. In the neighboring function room is an Indian wedding reception. As I brush shoulders with a woman in a sari on her way to the bathroom, I catch sight of the four of them preparing for their set. I enter the crowded room, a cocktail of characters composed of AMP members, performers’ families, and two members of Ang Bandang Shirley. Plastic table sets are strewn around an asymmetrical stage. Epileptic strobe lights occupy the right side of the room. A makeshift bar has been set up at the back. People are agitatedly excited. This is where Lolo’s Polo makes their debut.
I’d been hastily introduced to Lino, the lead singer and guitarist, some hours before. When I ask him how he’s feeling, he smiles faintly and looks past me, towards the stage. “I’m fine,” he mutters. “I feel like we’re older than everybody else.” He excuses himself and shuffles away to his friends. Jamo, the drummer and eldest member, exudes a similar nonchalance as I corner him behind a door and force him to answer my questions. “We didn’t want to go last,” is all he seems to care about. I assure him that closing a show can turn a good set into a great one. He nods but doesn’t say much else, so I ask him about his outfit. “It’s a polo.” He explains, gesturing at what is obviously a polo, cut and fitted in the style of the proverbial Philippine senator. “We swore we’d never wear polos, but look at us.”
It’s two weeks later, and Lino is recounting the night from his own perspective, revising my recollections: “I was so nervous,” he says. “I haven’t felt jitters like that in a while. It really felt like something new. There was a lot of uncertainty, which I think we thrived on in the end.”
For the band, coming together didn’t happen instantaneously. Miko, the guitarist, Nat, the bassist, and Lino had crossed paths in high school, but the idea of assembling never quite occurred to them until they found themselves together in college once more. Jamo came along to complete the group, solidifying years of cursory encounters. Right now, however, he’s nowhere to be found; a felt absence in our interview. That doesn’t stop us from talking about him though.
“He said no the first time we asked him to be part of the band, coz he had a lot of things on his plate,” Lino recalls. “But we sweetened the deal eventually.”
“Jamo’s actually my neighbor,” Nat puts in. “He lives right in front of my unit, and we never talked.”
“There was a spiritual connection from the start. It was destined.” Lino says with a slight lisp, pronounced enough to mildly irk a speech coach but not as severe as that kid on Stranger Things. If anything, however, it only seems to add to his magnetic character. Impish in an Instagram-friendly way, Lino is a definitive frontman, with an electric presence and a strong, searing voice. Born into a musical family and raised on The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, he got his start playing in his older brother’s band, Hansom. As we speak, I’m secretly thankful that he bypasses my gaze. Direct eye-contact just doesn’t seem to be something I’m ready for. He isn’t intimidating; he’s just born cooler than most people. The group’s primary songwriter, Lino has the charisma of an irreverent class delinquent and the creative intellect of a tormented poet. Currently minoring in creative writing, he counts APO Hiking member Jim Parades as one of his professors. I ask him which lyric he’s proudest of. He opts for a line in the second verse of Lights Out, a piece of social commentary on the country’s current political context: The pigs are coming out and they’re dressed in blue / Mud dries well under leather shoes. “It’s a very Orwellian image,” he says. I take this as a cue to pursue a literary digression.
Nat, who looks scary but is actually a nice guy who reads Oscar Wilde, likes The Portrait of Dorian Gray for its striking yet simplistic utilization of language. Educated in guitar by a perpetually hungover tutor, he developed a fascination with the bass, making the switch eventually. “Some people think it’s boring,” he says with a voice that matches his instrument. “I think there’s lots of creative things to do with it.” I think of the riff in Michael Jackson’s Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ or the drone in Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain and agree wholeheartedly.
Miko lights up when I ask him what his favorite book is. “Catcher in the Rye,” he says, sure of himself. The other two jokingly mock his angry boy predilections. Tall and lanky, Miko is an excellent guitarist, able to give flesh and blood to the skeletal song structures Lino brings to the operating table. “I feel like there’s a bit of Holden Caulfield in all of us,” he continues. “[It’s] that part of us that feels frustrated. I feel like there’s a correlation between that book and my angry guitar,” he laughs.
“Is Lolo’s Polo an outlet for your leftover teenage angst?” I ask.
“I feel like it’s a developed teenage angst,” Lino says. “Like we’re angsty boys who grew up and are beginning to understand what we felt before.”
If Lolo’s Polo’s sound were a movie character, it would be Randy Floyd from Dazed & Confused, if it were an actor, Nat thinks it would be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Anyone angry at the world would do. When they’ve gotten a song together but Lino hasn’t written lyrics yet, they improvise by shrieking fuck yous for minutes on end. It’s a cathartic ritual, and it pays off when they debut in front of an audience that just wants to rock out already.
“My name is Lino,” Lino says to the audience at Kowloon House, “and I’m wearing my lolo’s polo.” The audience laughs, and, because I’m a sheep, I laugh with them. People are chanting for Jamo to take his shirt off. My drunk friend yells profane declarations of love aimed at Nat, then apologizes to his girlfriend. There’s a guy in front of me who keeps shaking a can of nails in one hand and a bottle of Sprite in the other. I don’t get any of it. I don’t care. The music stands on its own.
The performance is the band’s baptism by fire. Dynamic and guttural, it stimulates the kind of cultish hysteria usually reserved for established names. A spontaneous mosh pit mobilizes itself into frenzied possession. Everything they cover is fitting, from Gorillaz’s Clint Eastwood to Arctic Monkeys’ I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor. It’s their cutthroat delivery, however, that distinguishes them from bands who might draw from the same influences. They sound rebellious, hungry, rude, like a mob at the height of a protest. By the time they launch into their original song—a sensational hard rock banger called Cut Me Loose—the audience has lost its mind. As I bend down to pick my underwear off the floor, I remember that this is their debut. Their debut.
“I didn’t think we were capable of getting that kind of reaction,” Nat tells me.
Lino nods. “We’re so thankful for the AMP community. Rites was fun man. As soon as we started playing, nawala yung jitters. It felt natural to be up there.”