After a hiatus of nearly three years, the Taipei band Sticky Rice (糯米糰) made a welcome return to the local music scene late last year with the band's second album Bird King (青春鳥王).
Packed with different styles ranging from electronica and funk to break beats, it was a far cry from the band's 1997 eponymous debut Sticky Rice (糯米糰), on which the band blasted its way through a collection of tunes packed with guitar-driven rough-and-ready musical mayhem.
Formed in the mid-1990s, Sticky Rice hit the local music scene at a time when the nation's now maturing indie scene was in its infancy. Led by lanky vocalist, Ma Nien-hsien (馬念先), who sported a mohawk hair-do and wore distinctive retro glasses, the band proved an instant hit, selling out many of the city's alternative music venues.
As the band built up a following among the indie crowd, Ma and his three bandmates -- Chen Chi-han (沉其翰) on guitar, Hung Chih-li (洪峙立) on drums and Yu Guang-yao (余光耀) on bass -- caught the attention of the movie industry. Director Chen Yu-hsun was so taken by the material on the album, that he invited them into the studio to record the soundtrack for his 1997 film Love A GoGo (愛情來了). The soundtrack was later nominated for Best Musical Score at the 1997 Golden Horse Awards.
Just as the band looked set to become one of only a handful of local acts to rise from garage band status to pop stars their country called. The lads were shipped to boot camp to begin their military service, where they remained until early last year.
The band may have been dormant while Ma, Chen, Hong and Yu were doing push-ups for the nation, but the local music industry didn't forget Sticky Rice. Shortly after being demobilized the band was back in the studio and recording a demo tape. Magic Stone signed them soon after.
"We sent demos to three labels and heard back from three of them pretty quickly, which was a real surprise," Ma said recently. "We were looking for a certain amount of freedom in the studio to record the music we wanted, rather than what the record label told us to."
Far from numbing the senses, military discipline appears to have paid dividends, as last year's Bird King attests. The album shows a tighter and musically more mature Sticky Rice. Thankfully, the military didn't take away the band's dead-pan sense of humor. The electronica/funk song Aluba Aliba, for example, tells of a game in which young boys compete to see who can run, jump and then slide across the ground and come to a halt closest to the trunk of a tree without damaging their manhood.
Any gig Sticky Rice headlines or even makes the briefest of appearances at is guaranteed to be a rowdy affair. The band doesn't offer stand-up comedy routines full of biting social commentary like their peers, Clippers (夾子電動大樂隊), but they have their own style of onstage nonsense. When the band kicks into a funk tune in the style of Sly and the Family Stone, the chances are the tune won't stay that way for long. The band will suddenly up the tempo and before audiences know what's happening an onslaught of electronica twists and guitars turns the tune into a thumping dance song that whips crowds into a frenzy.
While Sticky Rice cut its teeth on the fringe of the local alternative scene, the band remains adamant that they are not, and never have been, an "alternative" band. They are pop stars, they say, albeit rather eccentric ones.
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