Bukkake and udon? Astroninja digs both

On 31 December 2008, Dong from Singapore’s Astroninja spent S$450 on a hotel room. No, it wasn’t to do what people who spend that kind of money might want to do in a hotel room. It was simply a way for the 20 year old guitarist to celebrate the arrival of 2009 with some long-time friends, with a hope to catch a good view of the fireworks display at Singapore’s Esplanade.

Unfortunately, Dong and his friends were unable to catch the show from the room as a building obstructed their view. So it was off to join the street-side revellers, then back to the hotel room after the countdown where they partied well into the New Year. “Oh, I have to add,” he says, several days later. “I threw a watermelon and some ninja stars down from the 16th storey into the pool below. Something I haven't done in a long time.”

For Astroninja, throwing watermelons and ninja stars would have been an appropriately kooky way to conclude one insane year for one utterly insane band. Originally formed in the middle of 2007 as an all-star project by Levan Wee (formerly the frontman for Ronin), it has evolved into one of the fastest rising independent bands the Republic has ever seen. From opening for Funeral for a Friend (described by Levan as “a blast like a rocket from a tiny pistol”) to performing on national television for Channel 5’s Live And Loaded to finally releasing their debut album Kiss My Astro in November 2008, Astroninja have kung fu-ed their way into the national psyche with an equally accelerated surge of pop punk.

For Levan, Astroninja might be seen as a bit of personal retribution. The 24 year old had been in Ronin for five years and played an integral role in forging one of the country’s better-known rock acts. In 2005, the band’s debut (and only full-length release) Do Or Die was one of the highest selling English albums ever released by a Singaporean band. But in June 2007, he left the band as a result of creative differences. “With Ronin, there was a lot of tension that got in the way of our performances and even our songs,” he says simply. “With Astroninja, I feel like I've just climbed out of a dirty barrel into a garden of flowers.”

It was a tumultuous time for both the band and the scene, but Levan prefers to look to the future. And to him, the future is very much Astroninja. “Ninjas are like Asian versions of Super Mario, and we're really proud of being Asians who enjoy leaping onto funny-looking thingamajigs,” he says. “But seriously, when you think ‘ninja’ you tend to think Asia, and above all else we're proud of wearing our Asian influences.”

It’s not hard to see how a band with an ever-rotating lineup of madcap characters (currently consisting of “a crazed albino fellow, a rogue assassin Eurasian, two Chinese fellas who don't know any kung fu but are killer at chopstick ping pong and a cuddly woolly sheep whose name is Bobby”) will possess a very natural penchant for all things bombastic. At first glance, the songs leave little in the way of subtlety, much like the band’s persona. Take ‘Anthem For The Ordinary’; it erupts with synth runs, harmonised licks and Levan spitting “Hey you motherf*cker, are you talking to me?”–all in the first minute.

Yet behind Astroninja’s loony façade and apparent randomness lies an unmistakable dedication to devise music of the highest quality. Kiss My Astro took a year and a half to record. “We're very anal with the details, though you probably can't tell from the final product,” says Levan. “We believe the key to a good song is in its nuances. Just lumping together generic guitars, drums and bass isn't totally being ninja. We like the random yelps, the occasional screech, the little diminished chords that add sexiness and sugar to a nice fluffing of a cake of a song.”

There is certainly an abundance of nuances in the finished product. Levan pens the songs (“though I suck on the guitar about as hard as a baby on its mother's nipples”), which foundationally do not stray too far from the genre’s My Chemical Romance/Blink-182 roots. But thrust in the hands of virtuoso musicians with a soft spot for 80s rock, they become euphoric anthems that skivvy in and around a range of influences from that era, from Poison-styled hair metal to the shred fests of X-Japan.

Lead single ‘The Bukkake Udon Song’ is perhaps most emblematic of that devotion to detail. In three and a half breathtaking minutes, it deftly layers the chord chugging template of pop punk with panned vocals, intertwined keyboard and guitar lead lines, and a sprinkle of female-squealing “Oh”s through the song’s climax. OMG-rated fun is certainly scribbled all over its cheeky mug, but the intricacy almost barks for attention as eagerly as all that sniggering.

Simple and propulsive enough for moshpit madness, yet appropriately sophisticated to warrant careful dissection–Astroninja’s musical IQ is as cosmic as their state of mind. Almost as impressively, the band has demonstrated an acute grasp of what it takes these days to get noticed in a sea of thousands. The tireless legwork done online through niche websites like NewGrounds.com and VampireFreaks.com has earned Astroninja a rabid grassroots following far beyond Singapore in countries like Thailand, Australia, England and the United States. And all this virtual fawning has translated into massive monetary rewards too, as Kiss My Astro sold 8,500 copies worldwide in the first month, a figure almost unheard of these days for independent bands from this region.

The physical album itself is a magnificent testament to the band’s innovation. It comes in a giant yellow envelope with stickers, ID cards, a “Bobby the Sheep” button and a handwritten “Thank you” note–all of which screams “value for money” to even the most miserly of music fans. “I think packaging is a very essential thing that many local bands in Singapore overlook, but more importantly many bands here fail to grasp the intricacies of marketing and promotions, particularly online,” says Levan. “We saw a demographic of millions that we wanted to grasp, and we saw that most local bands hadn't yet taken that leap into the huge online world. If the scene is able to learn the ropes as a collective, it will push our scene forward by leaps and bounds. It is something I am still hoping will happen.”

On the back of Kiss My Astro’s overwhelming success, this year could see Astroninja make their way to the US for a tour of the coastal states. New songs are also being developed, with the aim of making them available for download. “It's surreal because we now have a load of fans from the US, Australia and London that chat with us online,” says Dong. “So for me, meeting them all in person would be somewhere at the top of my to-do list. Spread the ninja love and share some fancy moves to groove.”

Words Chris Photos Rueven
www.myspace.com/astroninary

*Taken from JUNK's March 2009 issue