Rollfast: The Deathrattle Trip

Tighten your saddle. Guzzle gasoline. Sniff some octane and slit ya wrists – nothing can stop the heart of this young man speeding, burning and going deep into the darkness. Not even his own fears. The boundaries of oppressive illusion and drunkenness are the norm, or like Rollfast bassist, Aan Triandana would say, “Paranoid.” For him, the group’s influences can not be separated from these five points; (1) Society. “The feeling of joy, sadness, begrudging spite, irritation comes from our social environment.” (2) Oneself. “Look more deep into your inner self because I want to explore myself.” (3) Problems. “If there are no problems we can’t think critically,” one of the band’s guitarists, Bayu Krisna drops in. And again from Bayu’s tongue, (4) Family. “They will always be our loyal supporters.” And he sprays again, the last (5), Joy of music. “Not always from the 70s. I’m not such a fanatic of Black Sabbath, sometimes I just wanna hear Duran Duran.”
Rollfast formed in 2011 when the members were around 17-18 years old. It was their unruly era as angsty, delinquent teenage boys as a band. Aan and the mysterious singer Agha Praditya were from the minority or considered outsiders at high school. But that’s not a bad thing, of course, because from there the vigor of their passion was born. Rollfast began from that passion.
All their songs are built on adrenaline. For example; ‘Multiple Desert’ is a roaring track as deadly as the blasting sounds of Armada Racun’s exhausting chain gang troupe along Jalan Ngurah Rai in ’71, or a heavy-weighted composition called ‘Baby 69’ which was baptized by Blue Cheer’s Vincebtus Eruptum, or a drum solo attack that would have Bonham/Baker standing back in awe from the Timor-afro beatmaker Ayrton Maurits Willem that intros their spacey excursion ‘Nudetilt’, or the most dangerous of all ‘Destination: Death’, an electric, bantam-weight heavy rock championship song about a desolate soul.
After two raw demos, two years ago in 2015 Rollfast finally release their full debut album Lanes Oil, Dream Is Pry via Trill/Cult Records owned by Natha Raharja. An album that obviously Bali’s sidestream rock scene needed, because the Bali scene is getting old. And anyway, it is the time for the punk rock, death metal and rockabilly majority of the island’s music scene to get their alternative sounds in gear.
As an album, it’s not to be underestimated. Let it bleed. Let it blurt, let’s call them the Long Riff Machine that would put pencil in your lead and burn your leather jacket.
Rollfast has The Door’s mixed in, with Zeppelin’s DNA already planted on their own. And of course there is so much free jamming too, yet distorted by the noise-polluted psychedelia the double guitars make. The other guitarist’s name is Gungwah Brahmantia.
But the question is, how can you feel so bleak in a beautiful and joyful land like Bali? Aan answers, “There are so many dark sides about Bali that many people don’t know. Among them is the fact that we are still not ready to deal with the globalization wave of today. We accept it all without thinking.”
In 2014 Rollfast toured four cities in Japan. And now they are still locking themselves away busily brewing new material for their sophomore album. They concede that it will be more original than the first. That means it will be more formidable. “And purple,” Bayu says. The establishment of his band career is just like a trip from rock & roll freedom to the tough life of spirituality, which means . . . ‘buy the ticket – take the ride’, turn it up to maximum volume and do whatever that you want to do: high voltage all the way.
By Rio Tantomo – SDW