Tesla and I Ching-inspired art pop + the new Carsick Cars album
+ Gilles Peterson’s new favourite Chinese band + Octopus Villain
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In this issue: why you should care about the new Carsick Cars album, exciting I Ching-inspired art pop, gorgeous grooves from the superlative Sleeping Dogs, the first new music in eight years from an intriguing folk metal act, a YouTuber watches way too much of The Big Band, and more.
Knowing me, knowing you: Carsick Cars toy with the familiar on new LP Aha
Late April 2007 and there’s a huge buzz around the Star Live venue in central Beijing. Tonight, Sonic Youth will take to the stage — and people have travelled from all over China to see them play.
Due to support them are three young musicians from the capital. Carsick Cars, formed just two years before, have been causing a stir on Beijing’s small but growing indie-rock scene with their fuzzed up guitar riffs and catchy hooks.
Yet shortly before the show is set to begin, there’s a catch. Word has come from the authorities that Carsick Cars will not be allowed to perform.
“That was a real bummer,” Thurston Moore told me a decade later, as part of a conversation with Carsick Cars’ frontman Zhang Shouwang. “It was a bit of a power move.”
Thankfully, Sonic Youth would help right that wrong by inviting Carsick Cars to open their tour dates in Prague and Vienna a few months later. And the story ended up becoming part of the Chinese band’s legend, perhaps even boosting rather than derailing their career. A few months later they would release their debut album, a bona fide Chinese rock classic.
Carsick Cars would go on to become the poster band for the capital’s burgeoning music scene. Partly fuelled by the media buzz around Beijing in the run up to the 2008 Olympics, international outlets from The New York Times to The Guardian gushed over their music. They’d soon head overseas to Australia and the US, becoming one of the first Chinese acts to perform at SXSW.
At home, they built up a dedicated following, with one ritual seeing fans inundate the stage with cigarettes, throwing them toward the band like flowers whenever they played ‘Zhong Nan Hai’ (the name of both a ubiquitous brand of Chinese cigarettes and the Communist Party’s seat of power in Beijing).
In the summer of 2009, the band released their second album You Can Listen, You Can Talk, yet around 18 months later founding members Li Weisi and Li Qing had left. Zhang would keep the band going, releasing a third album (simply called 3) in 2014 with a different line-up, but then Carsick Cars seemed to fizzle out — even as each member of the trio pursued a range of exciting side projects.
There was some surprise, therefore, when the two Lis rejoined Carsick Cars in 2017, performing their first album in its entirety at a festival organised by Split Works, the promoters who’d booked them to open for Sonic Youth a decade before.
There was perhaps even more surprise when they popped up on — and were quickly dumped out of — TV talent show The Big Band in 2020. Although there was an obligatory single rushed out in the wake of that appearance, it wasn’t clear whether the band was really ready to make new music again, or if their experience on the The Big Band had left them chastened, perhaps feeling that China’s rock scene had moved on.
A few weeks ago we got an answer in the form of a new single. Released a full decade on from the band’s last LP, it was entitled ‘Farewell’. Yet the single was more “hello again” than “goodbye” — the track came with the promise of a new album from Carsick Cars’ original lineup, and the refrain “Are you still there?”
The new album Aha doesn’t exactly contain the host of surprises its name might suggest. But was that what anyone really wanted? While some fans derided ‘Farewell’ as “tennis rock” when it was released, to me it felt like the kind of reflective, more mellow track that befits a band with members in their forties.
“Is this the same band who gave us ‘Guangchang’ and ‘Zhiyuan de Ren’?” asked one highly upvoted comment on NetEase under the track. The logic seems to be: how dare they not play with the same fearless intensity that saw them sing “this is a square of no hope” during the No Beijing era? Well, it feels like an understatement to say the climate has changed, but also — surprise! — the band grew up.
Of course, these comments also came before those bashing them out had heard the whole album. Turns out, it’s a gratifying mix of more grown-up, sometimes wistful songs and surges of energy that are reminiscent of the group’s first wave, even if they don’t quite carry the same electric excitement that came with the likes of ‘Mogu’ and ‘Hesheng’ when they were first released.
For long-term devotees, there’s both enough that’s familiar and a few new flourishes to keep things from feeling too repetitive. For the uninitiated, it’s a great introduction to Carsick Cars’ ability to combine swirling bouts of noise and driving guitar parts with hooks that stay in your head for days.
The band’s original influences — Sonic Youth, The Velvet Underground, Suicide — are still on full display. And along the way are perhaps some of Carsick Cars’ most sophisticated lyrics to date, dealing with memory and the passage of time, powerlessness and separation, even “certain death”. (Rumour has it the album was originally called Death in Chinese, but that title didn’t make it past the censors.)
“Are you still here?”
Maybe it’s the nostalgia talking, but I, for one, am here for this return.
Aha is out now. It’s called 口 in Chinese, which feels like a better name, but anyway.
Magic numbers: Kofey channels Tesla and the I Ching on art pop EP
“If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6, and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.” This quote, often attributed to Nikola Tesla, is the starting point for an intriguing new record from Yunnan-born singer Kofey.
The three-track 369 was originally released back in March, but it’s only recently found its way to Bandcamp. It was worth the wait.
Kofey recently put together a short but informative playlist on WeChat, with tracks from AG Cook, Li Yilei, and Helado Negro. ANOHNI also feels like a reference point for 369; Björk, who has been the subject of WeChat musings from Kofey before, is another.
And then there’s the visual work. Here’s Kofey’s self-directed video for the track ‘6’:
While the lyrics encourage you to “copy paste it” (“If you want to be another Bowie / Or thinking like Ernest Hemingway / Just copy-paste it”), a visually arresting dance piece unfolds, naturally accompanied by motifs playing with multiples of three.
The video for ‘3’ meanwhile, was filmed in Shangri-La, the largely Tibetan area in northern Yunnan once known as Zhongdian, but which had its name changed by the local government in 2001 in the hopes of attracting tourists to the region that is thought to have inspired James Hilton.
I can’t wait to see what the video for ‘9’ looks like.
369 is out now. It’s available, of course, for $3.69.
Watch this: Re-TROS doc, Backspace live set, and Bandsplaining takes on The Big Band
“In recent years, [China’s] music has become increasingly monotonous, more and more boring, less and less creative” — that’s Hua Dong of Re-TROS, talking as part of this slick mini-documentary about the band’s Beijing arena show. If things are that boring, maybe consider making more than one new song in seven years? Just saying.
Hua Dong has a point of course. The recent closure of Yuyintang, plus the general trend of music venues opening identical-feeling boxes in shopping malls hasn’t had me feeling great about the live scene in China lately. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Here’s a full 90 minutes of the brilliant Backspace performing live in Daily Vinyl’s intimate, quirky Suzhou outpost:
Even as someone who writes a newsletter about Chinese indie music every couple of weeks, I couldn’t stomach watching The Big Band — a TV show (ostensibly) about Chinese indie music — in its entirety. So hats off to Jeremy at Bandsplaining for making it through the show’s latest series (I think maybe several times?!).
Jeremy’s research included talking to
of the wonderful who said all the smart stuff when we did a special collaboration newsletter about the show last year. There’s also a couple of (mercifully brief) appearances from some guy who writes a newsletter about Chinese indie music.
Read this: Mando Gap on Octopus Villain’s playful indie pop
I didn’t have time to dig into the new Octopus Villain record for the last issue. But thankfully for you, instead of my waffling thoughts you can read all about it in
. Here’s a taste:“Combining bathroom fixtures with space imagery, like casting swirling water as a black vortex or mold on the ceiling as stars, when Octopus Villain drone in a monotonous hum, “I’m gonna flush myself to toilet,” the dynamic nature of the song makes it easy to imagine that it’s an entrance to their spacecraft rather than the goofy hook being a cry of defeated humiliation over an embarrassing bathroom mishap.”
Seasons in the abyss: thrash and folk metal releases to revel in
Been a while since we had some metal on this newsletter. Well, here’s a double dose to make up for that.
Earlier this year, Bloody Woods, a folk metal act who are closing in on two decades in existence, released a new EP on China’s premier metal label Pest Productions, their first new music since 2016. Now available on Bandcamp, From the Forests and Highlands features a reworking of an old track sung (I think) in Occitan and is a bit like if The Decemberists made a metal record.
Back in March, Beijing-based label Thrashing Cult held the first Thrashing Cult Fest at Shanghai’s Yuyintang Park. For those who didn’t make it, or for those who want to relive the night all over again, Chinese metal label Dying Art Productions has put all four bands’ sets up on Bandcamp. Alongside Japanese acts Fastkill and Abigail, you can enjoy Nanchang thrash outfit Explosicum and Beijing-based band Bob Blockhead Quartet:
Exit music
Finally, here’s 15 minutes of gold from one of my favourite Chinese bands, the brilliant Sleeping Dogs. It’s a live session filmed at Beijing’s Flake Records and features the band playing cuts from their debut LP Blunt Razor. They also perform a new track that featured on the Guguguru Brain compilation recently and was selected by the legendary Gilles Peterson for his 6 Music show.
Cover photo: Carsick Cars by Yuan Lei.
i missed Carsick Cars's shows in Guangzhou/Shenzhen and hope to make it to their later concerts
Thanks for sharing, Jake, and keeping us all up to date on what's going on in China. Definitely will listen to the new Carsick Cars 'Aha' album.
Only on Bandcamp, eh? Don't see it on Apple.