A Silvertone amp and a Kent guitar. From these two rudimentary tools — straight out of the Sears catalog — you can trace a fuzzy lineage of overdrive and experimentation. Evolution to devolution and back again.
The line goes from Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground down to Death and the Detroit protopunks, to Alice Cooper, Negative Approach and the Gories. From New York to Detroit and all points east, west and north. The south — they already knew what was up. They knew before we knew how to know. But that’s beside the point.
The point is that anything, even the very simple, can be the catalyst of a movement. It can start a whole new scene. It can set off an explosion of fresh, unfettered creativity. You don’t need to carpet bomb the old to do something worthy. Sometimes, you just need to go back to the basics. Look at the old black-and-white picture of Lou Reed with the Kent and the Silvertone. Return to the roots. Plug the department store guitar into the cheap mail order amp and just worship at the altar again.
Photo courtesy of Murky Crows
That’s the feeling you get when you start listening to Taipei’s Murky Crows (昏鴉). In a scene sometimes derided for a lack of originality, these death rockers seem to be in a class all their own, save Qi Lai Observatory (奇萊山觀測站). There’s a mystery about it. A palpable cloak of darkness born of Bauhaus, Joy Division, The Gun Club and Killing Joke.
I didn’t interview the band for this piece because part of me wants to keep that sense of the unknown alive. In an age when we know everything about the bands we listen to (every bit of infighting, every tiny development in the studio, each bit of personal minutiae) the sense of wonderment is crushed in an unchecked slurry of self-serving social media updates and overly pedantic blogosphere naval gazing. As the dearly departed BB King sang, “The thrill is gone.”
We need some distance between band and artist again. We need some danger. We don’t need GG Allin to come bursting out of his grave and start flinging feces and blood at everyone. But nor do we need every band to be our best friend. We need to go back to a time when bands spoke to us without actually speaking to us, in a language that was vague and open to infinite interpretation.
Photo courtesy of Crescent Lament
Like most human beings, I’m a selfish bastard. An aging, increasingly entitled and overly opinionated scenester. But I’m not wrong. Believe me when I say Murky Crows are one of the best things to come along in the Taiwan indie music scene in a long time. Believe me when I say we need to bring back the forgotten element of the untold.
■ Murky Crows plays Sunday at Legacy (傳音樂展演空間), 1, Bade Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市八德路一段1號). Tickets are NT$500 in advance, NT$700 at the door. The show gets underway at 7pm.
Taipei gothic metal band Crescent Lament (恆月三途) celebrates the long awaited follow-up to their 2011 debut, Behind the Lethal Deceit (末路之召) this weekend. The band’s new album, Elegy for the Blossoms (花殤), is a welcome return to action for the five-piece, driven by the haunting sustain of keyboardist Warose (real name Chen tzung-wei, 陳宗緯) and the emotive operatic vocals of singer Muer Chou (周慕姿).
In a metal scene loaded with the repetitive chug and formulaic adherence of deathcore and metalcore bands, the symphonic-minded acts with a bit of space for melodic nuance such as Crescent Lament and Anthelion (幻日) are largely islands unto themselves. No band is born in a vacuum, but in Crescent Lament’s case they had to grow up without local peers to measure themselves against, their sound closer to the European blend of radio-friendly hard rock and metal from the likes of Epica and Nightwish, with a dose of extremity leaning toward the symphonic black metal of Dimmu Borgir.
Crescent Lament are like strangers in their own land, outliers for the simple fact that, at least in the case of the local scene, they are doing something different. They’ve stuck at it, carving their own space out of the ether, remaining at times elusive, but always coming back just when you’re wondering where they might have gone. There is an almost indefinable beauty in their sound, and a sense of the ethereal, going back to that mystery thing I was harping on in the first half of this missive.
The word “enchanting” smacks of a naive sappiness, but there really is no other accurate way to describe Crescent Lament’s music. It’s music that enraptures. Again, you don’t wish to break it down to its binary definition. Music was never meant to be quantitative. The point is to get swept up. To allow the unperceived to overtake. That’s why nuance exists — to provide the elusive territory for peaceful contemplation abetted by reflective sounds. What that ends up becoming is up to you, the individual listener. The outcome of Crescent Lament’s sonic cryptogram is yours to decipher.
■ Crescent Lament plays Saturday at The Wall, B1, 200, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Tickets are NT$500 in advance, NT$400 at the door; the show starts at 7:30pm.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located