We've been getting so much cool weird Chinese music in recently. We made the tripped out Neu! meets Yellow Magic Orchestra of White+ our Record Of The Week, we reviewed the blissed out shoegaze pop of Boyz & Girl, our Chinese section is overflowing with stuff that we'll try to to get reviewed and posted on the site (even as we wait to get more of the aforementioned back in), but figured we'd start with this one, which we got on lp, and have a limited number of, and not super sure if we can get more and if we can, how long it'll take.
Didn't know much about these guys, other than the fact that they're apparently super popular in China, and have been honing a sound rooted in early industrial music, from the seventies and eighties, with nods to the Cure and Joy Division, a dark pulsing electronic minimalism, dark and psychedelic.
Check out the opener here, a softly pulsing synth, monotone vocals, swirling effects and slow shifting textures, dirgey and almost robotic, darkly hypnotic and dreamily tranced out, hearing this it's not hard to see why ex P.I.L. drummer Martin Atkins became obsessed with the group and insisted on producing their debut. The second track finds the sound splintering into something more jagged and new wavey, sounding a bit more like Joy Division by way of the Residents, or a much murkier, glooming goth pop Suicide, jagged melodies, blurts of noise, dense drones and throbbing programed pulses. Dramatic and noisy and woozily off kilter. The Residents vibe is huge throughout, a warped alien cabaret, kept in check by the low slung basslines, the programmed rhythms, murky and motorik, the layered loops, and the almost vaudevillian vocals.
Every track here is dark and woozy, rhythmic and minimal, some krautrocky and propulsive, others super abstract and avant, and still others gloomy and brooding, often the sound fusing the three, into some heady Chinese experimental electronic gloom pop weirdness, that we're digging more and more with every listen.
For fans of warped outsider pop, early electronic industrial, gloomy and gothy electro pop, and whatever surreal sonic stops might lurk in between.
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