Aphasia is a four-piece outfit born out of Nipples, a Taipei indie-rock band originally inspired by Sonic Youth. As Taiwan’s indie scene matured, so did the band’s sound, which gravitated towards the instrumental genre commonly called “post-rock.” In keeping with the new namesake, Aphasia’s members don’t sing — they fully embrace the language of emotional soundscapes, which they create with standard rock instrumentation: electric guitars, bass, drums, and the occasional synthesizer.
Having made its debut with the sound track to Cheng Wen-tang’s (鄭文堂) film Summer’s Tail (夏天的尾巴), Aphasia found inspiration in creating quiet, introspective moods, which led to The Crocodile Society of Aphasia, released last month on White Wabbit Records, an indie label started by the band’s bassist Yeh Wan-ching (葉宛青), better known as KK. Though the music isn’t a drastic leap from Nipples, Aphasia’s songs are more focused and refined.
Each song plays like a self-contained story, though all manage to stick to a main theme. The liner notes offer the band’s only verbal message, a slogan printed in Chinese that reads: “Not having [speaking] a language doesn’t mean you don’t have an opinion” (沒有語言，不代沒有意見).
The overall sound is ambient and detached, and relies heavily on electric guitars to direct the melancholy undertones that often grow into loud, mid-tempo rock laced with controlled screeching and howling. Behind the River begins with a gloomy melody line that builds into layers of guitar strumming and cymbal crashes. The reverb tones of Deep Spring and Rainy Season create a dreamy mood that hints at the compositions of jazz guitarist Bill Frisell; rocking tracks like Metal Tank and The Freedom Highway are drenched with overdrive distortion. Overall, the songs hold up well after repeated listening, but sometimes predictability creeps in, and makes later tracks like Graduate Travel seem labored and melodramatic.
Post-rock’s avant-garde pretensions may turn off some listeners, but Aphasia’s music shows thought-out craftsmanship and a sense of direction. The grooves draw you in slowly, while textured guitar sounds develop meaningfully and usually lead to satisfying hooks or resolutions.
— David Chen
Backquarter (四分衛) is all over the map stylistically, and this is part of the band’s charm. The group’s new album World is unabashed rock ’n’ roll fun that will please die-hard fans for its upbeat carnival of rock sounds, while unfamiliar listeners will have to keep up with the whims of these veteran rockers, who at one point flirted with mainstream label success but realized they were happier making music the way they wanted.
The album kicks off with Sandwich Love, a feel-good rocker with peppy horn arrangements and chorus hooks that hint at Japanese pop. There is also a Japanese rock feel to Panda Club, a hard-rock song full of bravado guitar riffs and rousing refrains. Amber has a funkier groove, with vocals drenched in a spacey reverb that nods to the 1980s and a quirky piano solo that comes out of nowhere.
The band uses a horn section to good effect on I Want a Huge Table, which lends a classic R ’n’ B touch to a modern rock groove. Audrey Hepburn, the band’s ode to the iconic actress, sports a catchy electronica-sounding bass line but overreaches a bit. The mood of longing throughout the tune doesn’t quite fit with lead singer Spark Chen’s (陳如山) lustful delivery of the final refrain: “Lady, lady, take me to your moon river.”
Backquarter received grant money from a Government Information Office (新聞局) program that helps Taiwan’s independent musicians, and they have put it to good use with this release. The album also sports an excellent packaging design with pop-up drawings and a novel way of presenting its liner notes and credits.
— David Chen
Never Ending Story (夢的延長線) is a two-disc set of music drawn from the Wind Music catalog to serve as, in the words of the subtitle, “a musical background to 10 years of creativity by Jimmy Liao” (幾米創作10年音樂風景). I had been prepared to dismiss the collection of 26 tracks as nothing more than high-grade elevator music, but there are in fact several reasonably interesting numbers, though the arrangement is utterly haphazard, jumping around from classical to Celtic revival and flamenco to lounge for no other reason than to pack the box set with plenty of mildly exotic snippets of music. The fact that a dialing code is given to download tunes as ringtones just about sums up the aspirations of this album, which is a repackaging and somewhat cynical marketing under the Jimmy Liao label of Wind Music’s back catalog.
That aside, samplers such as these are perfectly useful as an introduction to music with which one is not normally familiar. For world music fans, an introduction to Norwegian folk group Chateau Neuf Spelemannslag or the new age/jazz fusion of Jean-Marie Lagache might prove welcome, and works by various local composers, especially Fan Tsung-pei (范宗沛), who is best-known for writing film scores, are also quite interesting.
One element that seems to link the music is the presence of Western-inspired musical forms that have been so smoothed and polished that they glide by with virtually no impact. An example is the flamenco-themed The Red Infatuation by Fan. As with virtually every track, there are no rough edges, and the biting rhythms and visceral excitement of this musical form have been utterly excised, replaced by pleasantly melodic piano and sentimental accordion. Production values on this album are excellent, and if you are looking for a pleasant and varied musical mix to serve as background music, this would be a good choice.
— Ian Bartholomew
Wu Le Bu Tsuo (無樂不作) certainly provides value for money with its 30 tracks. But it’s more about quantity than quality. A careful look and you realize there are just five new songs. Nevertheless, this retrospective collection for the young artist who has shot to the major leagues through his leading role in the hugely popular local film Cape No. 7 (海角七號) is guaranteed reasonably good sales on the strength of its title track, which also is a key musical number in the movie. This reasonably competent rock anthem brings the movie to a rollicking high, but musically, it is unexceptional and almost completely derivative, setting the tone for the rest of the album, in which virtually every cliche of the pop-rock medium that can be used to lift mundane lyrics and a mediocre voice is found.
Fan is firmly set in the Mando-pop mainstream of adolescent love ballads that play out every variation of the “I love you, you love me” theme. Unfortunately, even given these limitations, the lyrics are not sufficiently interesting, nor is Fan’s voice particularly arresting, so despite over two hours of playing time, there is very little that is memorable. It is the low points that make something of an impact. Song’s like Do You Love Me (妳愛我嗎) should trigger the gag reflex in all right-thinking music fans. Its blend of cloying, syrupy lyrics, self-pitying posturing and bland acoustic guitar mood-making are memorable simply because they are so annoying. Other love ballads on the album don’t quite plumb the same depths, and the production quality ensures that nothing grates the nerves, but the lack of invention means that despite all the hype of Cape No. 7, Fan has so far failed to hit the number one spot in the charts, coming in at No. 11 and mostly inhabiting the lower half of the top 10 for the last two-and-a-half months.
— Ian Bartholomew
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