Grrrl Gang
Spunky
Kill Rock Stars
Spunky is the right word to describe this pop-punk trio from Jakarta, Indonesia. The band is made up of Angeeta Sentana (guitars, lead vocals, lyrics), Akbar Rumandung (bass guitars, vocals), and Edo Alventa (guitars, vocals). The band met while in college and are now making music around their day jobs like so many other cool bands.
The music of Grrrl Gang is energetic and encourages bopping around in front of the stage or in your apartment. Like many great poets and punk stars, Angeeta is working out some pretty heavy personal trauma in her lyrics. The first hint that something strange was going on came when I made out the chorus of “Spunky”: “I was born in the pit. I gave birth in the pit, I never shave my pits, Let me swallow your spit.” That got my attention. No simple moon-in-June stuff going on here.
In her notes for the songs, Angeeta admits that a lot of the songs deal with her getting a mental illness diagnosis. The songs are something of a girl’s journey from self-loathing to acceptance. On the opening track, “Birthday Blues,” she spits out “I’m a useless cum dump. Yeah, that’s what I am. I’m neurotic, manic, borderline psychotic. That’s all I am.” On “Good Girl” she moans, “I want to tear my skin apart. It never glows in the dark.” It’s clear that Angeeta has been working through some serious self-esteem issues, and I can relate to that.
The emotional fulcrum of the album is the instrumental “Tower Moment.” In tarot, a tower moment is when an unstable and old, negative belief or cycle comes to an end. The songs that come after “Tower Moment” find Angeeta dealing with her self-worth issues and working on accepting love. On “Blue Stained Lips,” she sings about her boyfriend, “You say I’m the best. Even though I’m a mess.” On the chorus she sings, “Cherish me, feed me with your love.” The album ends with “The Star,” which begins with “Don’t know how I got here” and ends with “I look in the mirror. And I like what I see.”
I’m glad that Angeeta’s journey ends on a positive note. Listening to Spunky isn’t eavesdropping on a therapy session, though. The heaviness of the lyric is balanced by the joyously upbeat music. No matter how down she gets, there is still an overwhelming lust for life in the tunes. The Grrrl Gang manifesto is summed up in these lines from “Fight Breaks Out in a Karaoke Bar”: “You’re never going to be this young again. You’re put on this godforsaken earth for a good time.”
I hope Grrrl Gang get some time off from their day jobs to come over to the U.S. and share their cathartic tune with us in a live setting.
