After partying through the final diluvian, booze-drenched weeks of 2013, the one lasting impression that remains is that in Taipei’s indie scene, everybody’s favorite band right now is Forests (森林). They stirred up one of the smiliest mosh pits ever on Christmas Day. Then they played again the very next day at the same club, Revolver, maybe just because it was the holidays. Mid-December, they played Revolver’s three-year anniversary. Then on New Year’s Eve, they were still in that same club till 4am DJing a set of 1960s garage, doo-wop and surf rock. It’s hard to remember a time when so many people were saying, “This is the band,” or when there was a band out there gigging all the time and making every time a party.
Last week Forests made the online release of their second album, No Fun, which is now on Bandcamp.com and — praise the Internet! — also streaming on the website of The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly in the US.
Other than gigging more or less constantly, “We don’t have any big plans or a tour or something planned. It’s just done, and now it’s yours,” says vocalist and guitarist Jon Du (杜澤威).
Photo courtesy of the Wall
That is not completely true. The three-piece is waiting for the pressed CDs to come out, and once that happens they are trying to organize a special release party at an abandoned industrial site. So stay tuned.
But in the meantime, check out their recorded music. No Fun is one of the best indie releases in Taiwan in recent memory, one of those my-basement-recording-studio-against-the-world kind of efforts that mixes garage punk guitar chords with doo-wop vocals and psychedelic fuzz. At least two or three songs are unabashedly surf tunes.
Vocals are, however, one of the things that set this album apart. At live shows, lead vocalist Jon Du sings into a condenser microphone, probably not so much because it adds extra range as because it adds a creamy, retro-quality. Against Forests’ crackly power chords and generally noisy post-punk sensibility, he sings like singers sang at the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll. Think of Nashville or Memphis in the 1960s — confident, clear melodic lines meant to soar over the fuzz, but instead of overcoming the distortion of overplayed records in a country store jukebox, he is singing in the milieu of rowdy garage punk. There are lots of “woo woo woos” and “wha wha whas,” and guitarist Guo-guo (Tseng Kuo-hung, 曾國宏) and drummer Zun-long (Lo Zun-long, 羅尊龍) chime in regularly with “ahhhh ahhhh” backing vocals. It is doo-wop and 1960s beach music all over again, only it is not. There is even one song called Woo Woo Woo. The lyrics amount to telling someone to take his clothes off.
Du grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey. “Basically it was suburbia,” he says — and gives the impression that he doesn’t really want to talk about himself. It is almost as if he had never even considered why anyone would be interested, though it is also possible he was being distracted by a cat. We are speaking by cellphone, and the first two or three times I ask about his background, he answers with a string of “huhs,” after which he finally replies, “Sorry, I’m really distracted right now. There’s a cat living upstairs and it never comes down here. But it just came down and now it’s giving me this really weird look. Sorry, what was your question?”
Du’s mother was a piano teacher and he played music from a very early age. He started playing in bands at 18 and by the mid-2000s was in a group called The Ides that was playing regularly in New York’s Lower East Side bars, places like Fontana’s, The Bitter End and Arlene’s Grocery.
“We technically played the Hammerstein Ballroom once, but that doesn’t really count because it was totally not our thing,” Du says.
The hipster enclave of Williamsburg, for him, “was not really a thing.”
He moved to Taipei in 2008. If he brought anything to Taiwan’s indie scene aside from his musical talents, it was the life experience of a fish who had lived in a bigger bowl and a sense of urgency about not waiting for permission from authority figures before going ahead with the creation of culture. Unlike Taipei, New York has no government subsidies for bands to record albums, and being shy gets you nowhere.
Du started playing with a lot of people in Taipei’s scene, and eventually settled into the trio Forests with bass player Guo-guo and drummer Zun-long, one of the scene’s best and most sought-after rhythm players. Before Forests, Zun-long has in various capacities played with the bands Boyz & Girl, Go Chic, Green!Eyes, Sleaze and Sunset Rollercoaster.
“The way we play music,” Du says, “It’s not methodical, not analytical or intellectual in any way. It just comes out really easily and naturally and I’ve never had that before.”
“We all listen to different things,” Du continues. “Before the end of last year, it was almost all 1920s ragtime jazz for me. That was about all I listened to. Guo-guo and Zun-long are both really into gypsy jazz. But it is almost impossible to say we listen to just that.”
What about the New Year’s Eve DJ set of 1960s garage rock? “The club actually asked us to play that, but it was also just stuff we were all diggin’ on.”
■ To dig on Forests new album, check it out at www.foresting.bandcamp.com.
James Blake just won last year’s Mercury Prize for his second album, Overgrown, and is nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist at the end of this month. Next week, the 25-year-old British singer will be in Taipei at Legacy. Blake plays piano, croons in plaintive, eerie high-pitched wails and moans, and then chops everything up in the computer, producing crystalline compositions based around minimal, glitchy beats. His music is strange, ethereal and in no way employs any standard song structures used in pop music. Often it is compared to jazz, but could just as easily be compared to laptop pop or post-rock. Blake, a 198-cm-tall vegetarian barely out of college, in many ways epitomizes the self-contained, solitary youth of the digital age — connected to everything but ultimately alone and suffocating and wanting love. He has been called a genius by many, and though that is certainly overstating things — his biggest early hits were covers, A Limit to Your Love from Feist and The Wilhelm Scream borrowed from his father — he is certainly a unique talent who is taking music in new directions.
■ James Blake will perform next Friday at 7pm at Legacy, 1, Bade Rd Sec 1, Taipei (台北市中正區八德路一段1號). Tickets are $2400 or $2,200 in advance through iBon or FamiPort.
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