A penguin with a promising future: Arigato, Hato!
MANILA, Philippines - If pop and shoegaze met at a party and shared a dreamy kiss in the middle of the dance floor — well, Arigato, Hato! would play at their wedding. This five-piece indie outfit has been earning followers and fans left and right, and if you haven’t heard of them yet, now is the time to tune in because Hato’s got big beautiful things in their future. We talked to frontwoman Gato, bassist Bee Bear, and beats guy Koala about stage names, mohawks, and their upcoming trip to Singapore.
It took Arigato, Hato! almost a year of lineup changes before they coalesced into the current supergroup of Cat Cortes, Mikey Abola, Joe Fontanilla, Martin Tensuan, and Ayon Sanchez. Onstage, they’re respectively Gato, Bee Bear, Anteater, Panda, and Koala. This rechristening, like a Garden of Eden redux, heightens the fable-like quality of Hato’s music. “There’s a lot of animal imagery [in our songs]; so why not be part of the story?” Cat says.
Ayon treats the animal persona as a common zone where the Arigato, Hato! sound comes into fruition, while Mikey simply enjoys appending some of his e-mails with “Bee Bear” rather than “Mr. Abola.”
With their complex bass lines, atmospheric synth, and the occasional xylophone, Arigato, Hato! is technically impressive from the get-go, but their chemistry is a thing of wonder. Mikey illustrates the creation of a song, which usually begins with Cat’s musical doodles and bedroom recordings: “In a way, you could consider our songs as the band collectively and individually interpreting Cat’s musical germ.” Meanwhile, Cat is mulling over their discrete sources of inspiration. “Everything that has happened and is happening in our individual lives goes into our music.” She praises her friends’ idiosyncrasies and achievements outside the band, citing their guitarist Joe’s mohawk as the source of Hato’s current punk overtones, and Ayon, an award-winning athlete, as the reason their beats “sound like they were carefully and precisely hit by a golf club.” Ayon himself returns to the animal names as a centering device that focuses them on the sound, professing that “the sum of our individual craziness [is embodied by] that little A,H! penguin, which is like Captain Planet but flightless.”
World domination seems imminent, and it starts gently in Singapore. Kindassault Records recommended Arigato, Hato! to play in Singapore’s Esplanade on July 30 and 31 alongside other local indie geniuses Us-2 Evil-0 and The Bernadettes.
Manila’s going to miss them for a while, but Arigato, Hato! is sure to return with more musical tricks up their collective sleeves.
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E-mail them at arigatohato@gmail.com with shirt orders and declarations of love!
