Here’s a band to watch out for. The White Eyes play garage rock but avoid the trap of getting lost in their own noirish, playful sound. Keeping everyone’s attention is lead singer Gao Xiao-gao (高小糕), whose girlish voice leads a swirling storm of electric guitars and retro-punk beats.
No No No starts off this five-song EP and is a fun, emotionally dynamic number. The band’s sonic DNA gets laid out in the first 20 seconds: a fuzzy distorted rock riff from the guitar on the left, a laser ray sound from the guitar on the right, then a “Wha-oh!” from Gao, lifting the song into a tension-building groove that explodes into grungy angst. Her voice turns sultry at the bridge, and her moaning is both creepy and sexy.
The droning, hypnotic Narcissism Personality Disorder (自戀人格異常) builds into a frantic groove that hides ska and funk beats underneath. The song, a character sketch of a person who feels suffocated in a relationship, resolves nicely by leaving listeners to wonder about a “secret” yet to be told.
Gao shows promise for her versatile vocals, which no doubt played a role when the White Eyes won the Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival’s (海洋音樂祭) battle of the bands in 2008. She sings with brash, youthful verve and thankfully never falls into gimmicky cutesiness. For its part, the band is tight when it needs to be, and treats the songs with the right balance of roughness and polish.
Comparisons to Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are inevitable in light of the band’s overall sound, but there are hints of Taiwanese indie rock in their music, particularly in the dreamy musing and post-rock stylings of A More Beautiful Life (多美好的人生) and All the Things.
The White Eyes say they plan to release a full-length album later this year. Until then, this EP will satisfy a craving for fun, raw rock ’n’ roll.
— DAVID CHEN
LTK Commune’s (濁水溪公社) new album, Sapphire, is more of the same.
But that’s a good thing, especially if you’re a fan of the group, considered by many to be the first real taike (台客) rockers. LTK’s penchant for combining outrageous stage antics, working-class karaoke pop, modern rock and social satire has made them one of Taiwan’s most beloved non-mainstream bands for a decade.
The album’s hodge-podge of musical styles offers a glimpse of the band’s musical sense of humor. One of the album’s early tracks, The Answer (無解), sounds like corny Chinese pop straight out of a Hong Kong detective flick. Useless Youth (青春無用) flaunts raunchy rock riffs and synthesizer sounds that scream 1980s.
The funky Cold Summer Night (冰冷夏夜) sounds like it belongs on the sound track for a spaghetti western starring Taiwanese gangsters, if there were such a thing. Why I Exist (何必有我) takes LTK to their noise rock and punk roots, while Psychedelic Hill (迷幻山崗), one of the album’s catchiest tracks, mixes late 1960s Beatles, country rock and indie pop.
Underneath the humor there are strains of social commentary. In Homesickness (出頭有機會) a laborer tries to remain optimistic while out of work, but the song’s hokey pop hooks make his predicament seem all the more bitter.
In terms of overall sound, Sapphire is more refined than the band’s earlier output, with a few slick horn arrangements and clean pop production. Some die-hard fans might pine for a return to the punk-nakasi fusion of albums like 1999’s classic Taik’s Eye for an Eye (台客的復仇, literally “Revenge of the Taike”).
But LTK’s twisted, zany spirit remains as strong as ever, and Sapphire’s extensive liner notes provide full English translations of the Mandarin and Hoklo lyrics for fans to soak it all in.
— DAVID CHEN
Cheer Chen (陳綺貞) started small, but with her new album Immortal (太陽) she is quite clearly standing tall on the Mando-pop stage. That’s not to say she has completely lost her singer-songwriter street cred, but Immortal is a relatively big production, containing tracks with orchestra and all the effects of a professional studio.
There is one simple acoustic number, Going to England Next Week (下個星期去英國), which harks back to Chen’s early career of simple lyrics set to guitar. A song about the breakup of a long-distance relationship, it is both contemporary and nostalgic for the days of the campus song, and has a matter-of-factness untinged by self-pity.
The majority of tracks go for a bigger impact, using orchestral and studio effects. One of the most appealing of these is The Edge (魚), with its catchy chorus and sophisticated lyrics, which manages to be introspective without being self-indulgent.
In this album, the former philosophy major is often tempted into rather woolly cerebration about the meaning of life and love.
Another black mark is that the vocal style in a number of tracks is eerily similar to Faye Wong’s (王菲) in hits such as You’re Happy (So I Am Happy) (你快樂所以我快樂). This is particularly evident in the opening number Rebirth (手的預言) and Take Away (一首歌，讓你帶回去), with their listless, enervated delivery. Chen does this quite well, but the similarities tempt one to dismiss the songs as too hopelessly derivative in style to warrant close attention.
The album as a whole, with English song titles (which bear no relation to the titles in Chinese) hinting at deeper philosophical concerns, comes over as just a tad pretentious, but is worth a listen for a lyricism that reflects a more thoughtful attitude to the standard Mando-pop love ballad.
— IAN BARTHOLOMEW
A protege of music impresario Jonathan Lee (李宗盛), Fish Liang is one of the more attractive products of Taiwan’s music industry. Although she was born in Malaysia, Liang’s musical career has mostly developed in Taiwan. She now has nine albums to her credit and has established a reputation as a master of the love song.
The lushly romantic opening track Don’t Cry for Him Anymore (別再為他流�?s rather blandly conventional with its piano and plucked string accompaniment, but it’s followed up by the playful No Ifs (沒有如果), which is a clever mix of vocal and instrumental styles, shifting from a boppy chorus, nodding toward electronica and letting rip with nostalgic solo riffs from guitar. Then it’s back to piano and strings with Hold Me Tightly (用力抱著), before shifting again into rhythm and blues-tinged duet with compatriot Gary Tsao (曹格). And so the album rings the changes, covering plenty of stylistic ground and proving that Liang is very much here to stay.
The stripped down number That’s Why Love Is That Way (愛情之所以為愛情) shows off Liang’s proficiency in handling the shifts in key and changes in pace beloved of the KTV cognoscenti. Lyrically, Fall in Love and Songs makes little effort to break new ground, and while this is a much more assured production that something like Cheer Chen’s Immortal, it is also a lot less interesting.— Ian Bartholomew
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