It’s easy to get lost in Sugar Plum Ferry’s third and latest release, Islands On The Ocean of The Mind (腦海群島), the title of which suits their post-rock sound. The album’s six tracks blend into one another through droning rhythms, melodic themes that ebb and flow and recurring waves of electric guitar distortion and crashing drums that wash the melodies away.
The four-piece band, which formed in Taipei in the late 1990s, makes instrumental rock with a cinematic flavor. On Islands, they pick up where they left off from 2007’s Thank You for Reminding Me, in which the CD cover suggested a theme in a snippet of text that read “There’ll be one day we human beings can fly, one day we wear out our shadows.”
That day arrives on Islands. The liner notes consist of more cryptic prose describing how “we got rid of our shadows” and experienced “the joy of freedom.” Along with the album art — graphic novel-like illustrations of an oceanside city seen from a bird-eye’s view and towering buildings that look like concrete forests — this is perhaps one way to make sense of the urgent tempo of the first track, False Awakening (清醒夢).
But true to post-rock form, Sugar Plum Ferry is all about soundscapes rather than words. Deerfield at Dusk (黃昏鹿場) begins with a quiet, lulling melody on a electric guitar, and builds layer by layer into a dramatic chorus voiced by a horn ensemble. The song shifts back and forth between quiet and loud and sparse and lush.
There is a sad undertone to the entire album, which gets massaged by steady, deliberate grooves from the band’s two guitarists, who switch between slow and dreamy melodic lines and metronome-like strumming. The effect is emotionally numbing on People, People (人兒呀).
The album’s best track, Night Celestials (夜星子), flirts with black metal and grunge and is one instance where the band’s normally measured temperament threatens to explode.
— DAVID CHEN
Taiwan’s indie scene hasn’t seen this much fun from a “Girl-power” band in a long time. Go Chic’s I Am Confused! is an energetic electro-rock romp that sounds anything but confused. This debut album, from a Taipei group formed in 2007 by high school classmates Ariel Zheng (鄭思齊), Sarah Wen (溫一珊) and Sonia Lai (賴思勻), is full of catchy beats, punk verve and a sassy, irreverent wit.
Zheng, the band’s 22-year-old vocalist, sings about dancing, partying and boys — some of them cute, some of them repulsive. On the anthemic This is Go Chic, which celebrates “party party people” on the dance floor, she is both flirtatious and taunting: “You’re looking pretty fit/Doesn’t mean I’ll take your shit.”
Beneath the disco revelry, Go Chic also sneaks in some commentary about pop culture and the influence of the West. Culture Supervisor, which has a line that inspired the album title, is about a “culture vulture” who is an “East-West mixture.”
On P.O.D, Zheng rants about a self-righteous, sleazy foreigner in Taipei: “What’s your job, no wait let me guess, must be an English teacher/You go to clubs every night hitting on hot chicks ’cause damn you’re a player/Keep pimping pumping pompous loser I’ll teach you some manners.”
Above all, though, these songs are designed to get your body moving — and they do. Go Chic are great at balancing synth-noise and guitar jams with catchy pop hooks on songs like Hard Date and 24hr Party Pooper. Clap It for the Heartbreakers is another anthemic dance tune and the perfect antidote for those tired of mindlessly stale nightclub music.
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