In the age when content consumers are spoiled brats, why "buy" when you can get almost anything for free? News, magazines, movies, music. A record store can be as difficult to find as running into physical copies of any new albums.
Getsunova The First Album. photo courtesy of White Music
Thai band Getsunova, however, has recently gone against the tide by unleashing The First Album in two physical formats: limited edition box set and standard CD. After hitting the shelves on May 26, the special edition box quickly sold out.
Getsunova consists of frontman Prakarn Raiva, guitarist/synth player Panoth Khunprasert, guitarist Natee Osathanugrah and drummer Komkadech Sangwattanaroj. The band is no newcomer. With four hits achieving 100 million views, 600 million counts altogether, the quartet has been active in the industry for 10 years.
With the band's extensive creative involvement and input, Getsunova The First Album's concept design and art direction were conceived by Supichan Rojvanich, who is behind a number of cool album covers (Cocktail, Mild, Slot Machine, Ben Chalatit, Stamp). The band is probably most recognised for their contradictory song titles and for concealing their faces onstage. They pushed surrealism further, as they appear shrouded on the cover in cloths with reference to Rene Magritte's The Lovers series. The uber cool imagery throughout the album was shot in a mysterious location to seem somewhere out of the Earth.
From a listener's perspective, Getsunova The First Album limited edition box set is one of the most exciting Thai album designs of our time. The limited collector's release comes in an elaborate packaging of three CDs with 24 tracks (10 from the new album, four special songs and 10 singles from their unreleased debut Electric Ballroom). As the studio effort marks the 10-year musical career of the band, the highly collectable box curates extra memorabilia of lyrics drafts, tiny artworks, old photographs and inspirations of the band since day one to make their die-hard fans who own a copy feel like being part of their long journey.
While having a full-length album is an ultimate dream to all artists, the fact that it takes one full decade to prove to have a strong fan base and to finally release a physical album released today, in a way, shows how struggling the local business can be. For Panoth, the band's lead member, he considered the release their long-awaited "reward", while the assumptions people made about the death of CD sales, in this case, proved to be wrong.
Getsunova The First Album has been out for two months and remains in demand (it is now only available in standard version). It is good to see such a sleek music design and that the physical format of music is still well received by serious listeners.
In the second half of the year, the band is scheduled to perform in Melbourne, Sydney and Tokyo -- with the album to be released in a limited number of vinyl copies. What we learn from Getsunova is their faith in music, dedication and perseverance paid off. That they finally got to hold their album in their hands is largely attributed to the fact that they never gave up.
