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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Carsick Cars - You Can Listen, You Can Talk

You might not know a great deal about China's Carsick Cars, so here is a quick history lesson to bring you up to speed. You Can Listen, You Can Talk is the Beijing band's second album – following their debut Panda Noise – and arrives on the back of their recent debut tour of this country. Produced by legendary producer Wharton Tiers (Sonic Youth, Helmet, Dinosaur, Jr), the album, which mixes English and Chinese lyrics and song titles, shows off the writing skills of frontman Zhang Shouwang in that it offers a complex combination of delicate, shimmering songs with exciting, almost chaotic eruptions of noise.

At times there is a shoegazey element to proceedings, like the fuzzy, six-minute long Invisible Love, which makes it easy to see why they were once hand-picked as a support act for Sonic Youth. Meanwhile, Big City Friend, with it's pretty melody and delightfully skewiff vocals, starts off sounding like Teenage Fanclub and The Velvet Underground having a cuddle, diverts into a full-on rock-out at the song's mid point before going back to where it started. This is a band that clearly isn't frightened to experiment with the structuring of their compositions. Elsewhere, the excellent Kill Tomorrow uses dense, layered guitars and pounding drums to create an intensely dizzying atmosphere akin to one of Nirvana's less accessible b-sides.

Perhaps being introduced to the cream of Chinese guitar-based indie music wasn't top of your list of priorities this week, but if you are curious to learn, then You Can Listen, You Can Talk is a good place to start. This is an inventive and rather fun record.

Interview by Bobby Townsend. It first appeared in Sydney's Drum Media

1 comment:

shaun/tenzenmen said...

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