Ask people who frequent indie rock clubs in Taiwan about their favorite groups these days, and the name Forests (森林合唱樂團) is likely to come up.
For the past year, this trio of slightly nerdy-looking male twenty-somethings have been winning over rock club audiences for their very noisy but melodic take on rock ‘n’ roll, not to mention their intense, on-stage energy.
Forests have just completed its first full-length album, The Moon is Man (see page 12, of the Aug. 28, 2012, edition of the Taipei Times for a review), and have just launched a mini-tour of Eslite Bookstores across the country, which continues tomorrow night in Tainan.
Photo courtesy of Steve Leggat
The buzz surrounding Forests took off in earnest when the band served as the opening act for Death Cab for Cutie at its show in Taipei in March. Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard posted on his Twitter account that Forests’ show was “best thing I’ve seen in a long time,” further cementing the band’s street cred.
None of this has been a surprise to Sky Tai (戴杏芳), a musician and the promoter behind Death Cab’s show in Taipei, who has also brought other notable bands from the West to Taipei such as Broken Social Scene and Deerhunter.
“Forests have a unique mojo, and I’ve always felt their performances were very special,” she wrote in an email written to the Taipei Times. “Whenever I have them as the warm up act for [international bands], I always feel that they’re up to the same level.”
Photo courtesy of Forests
Crank it up
Before Tai decided to offer to help Forests by becoming its manager, she says she was already a big fan of the band in its previous incarnation as Boyz & Girl, in which the three “boyz” — guitarist Jon Du (杜澤威), bassist Tseng Kuo-hung (曾國宏), drummer Lo Zun-long (羅尊龍) — worked with female singer-songwriter Ban Ban (斑斑), aka Bambam Lin (林以樂).
Boyz & Girl put out one self-titled album (see page 14, June 10, 2010) before disbanding due to personal differences. Lin has gone off on her own and performs under the name Skip Skip Ben Ben, while Du, Tseng and Lo have found their niche as Forests.
The connection between Boyz & Girl and Forests is easy to hear. Both bands like lots of reverb, extremely loud, distorted guitars, muffled vocals with barely audible lyrics. But whereas Boyz & Girl emphasized dreamy and abstract soundscapes laced with eerie sound effects, Forests is more straight-up modern rock.
The trio’s sound is ear-piercingly loud — Du’s guitar playing swims in fuzz and distortion — but the music is just melodic enough to keep your attention, with song structures that run the gamut from post-punk a la Joy Division to Iggy Pop-style blues rock.
Capturing the moment
Du, who is also the band’s lead vocalist, says Forests takes an off-the-cuff approach to songwriting. They work out their songs by recording themselves jamming in a practice studio and then going back and picking out the parts that sound good.
“Honestly, we don’t know what we’re doing until we listen back,” Du said with a laugh during an interview with the Taipei Times earlier this week. “I feel like when we’re creating [songs], I would consciously try not to be conscious in what I’m doing.”
“Boyz & Girl’s record was more of a self-conscious record for me, where I was trying to fulfill my idea of what someone else listening to the record would be.”
Forests had a simple plan for making The Moon is Man. “We just wanted to make a rock ‘n’ roll record,” he said, adding, “This time we were just like, ‘let’s capture the moment.’”
And that they did. Over the summer the band recorded the instrumental parts for the album in just two days at a studio and then overdubbed the vocals at the Taipei club Revolver. They recorded the vocals there because they could be as loud as they wanted, says Du, who sang into a microphone plugged into a guitar amp, which accounts for his scratchy timbre (it often sounds as if he’s singing into a telephone), and, at times, inaudible lyrics.
Forests’ penchant for “lo-fi” audio aesthetics trickled down to their recording techniques. Though the band members recorded digitally onto a computer hard drive, they also tried, albeit with mixed success, to touch up their final mixes on a 4-track cassette recorder. They went back to the digital tracks in the end, but Du says they avoid using software effects throughout the whole process and will likely record on tape for their next release.
Du, a 26-year-old Taiwanese-American from New Jersey who has lived in Taipei for four years, comes across as a shy, absent-minded slacker who would rather be playing his guitar than talking about himself and his band.
Classical roots
The son of a piano-teacher mother, Du’s musical talent has its roots in classical music. He was first violinist in his high school orchestra in New Jersey, but describes himself as “the worst concertmaster ever, wearing white socks and forgetting his violin on the day of his big competition.”
Du seems particularly embarrassed when talking about the praise that Forests has received, and Ben Gibbard’s tweet about the band, which has circulated widely in the local indie rock community.
“Obviously, it’s cool — Ben Gibbard really likes us, but we don’t want that to be the defining aspect of the our band.” Du says he feels “uncomfortable” seeing the infamous tweet posted everywhere, given that Gibbard was “really nice” to the band when he came.
Don Quan (關奕威), the owner of the Mercury, a small rock club in Kaohsiung, is another big fan of Forests, and not just because the band “blew the roof off” of his venue.
“Despite all the accolades and praise heaped upon them the past year or so, they are extremely nice, polite, humble, down-to-earth guys,” Quan wrote in an email to the Taipei Times earlier this week. “I think that’s what I like about them the most. Next to the great music, of course.”
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