Gig: Spring Scream 2010

Every year at the start of April there is a music festival in Taiwan called Spring Scream. It takes place in the very southern tip, in a beautiful hilly park close to one of the main tourist destinations, Kenting, with stages nestled in little hollows naturally insulated from each other by the geography. If you want to explore the Taiwan music scene in one weekend, this is the time and place to do it.

Don't expect it to be the equivalent of Glastonbury or other major music festivals -it might be the biggest music festival in Taiwan, but it is still in Taiwan, so it has more the feel of a small, amateurish, local festival. If you want electronic music or Taiwanese pop, there are other parties going on in the area, but apart from a DJ stage Spring Scream is mostly live music based, which is why I went. Most bands are indie, but there are other genres, like hip hop, reggae, punk and - yes, of course, otherwise it wouldn't be on this blog - metal.

Unfortunately the program you get is not particularly informative: it tells you the band name in English and Chinese, the time, the stage, and that's it. Last year there wasn't even that. To know even vaguely what a band sounds like if you've never heard them before, even if you go to the website, the only thing to do is listen to their MP3s. Last year I missed any metal bands that were playing, so this year in preparation I spent the two weeks before methodically going through all the bands on the site.

Well, not all the bands listed online were in the final program, and not all the bands listed had been online, so I may have missed some, but when I got there I had 5 at least vaguely heavy bands I wanted to see: Emerging From the Cocoon(破繭而出), Cheeze (their Chinese name 去死 translates literally as "go die" which as far as I know is the equivalent of "fuck off", which is much more metal then their English name), Solemn (恕), Eye of Violence, and Dept Creatures (怪物百貨 - this last band from Japan).

Solemn (I bit doomy from what I remember) were playing on the Friday before we got there, Eye of Violence (pretty good melodic death metal) didn't show, at least not at the time and place advertised, and I missed Dept Creatures (hard rock rather than full on metal). This left just two bands, both playing in the middle of the afternoon: Cheeze on Saturday, and Emerging from the Cocoon on Sunday.

QuSi

I missed the start of QuSi (I don't think I can bring myself to keep typing "Cheeze"), as did many people judging by the crowd, but not much. Black clothes and long hair was the look here, dampened slightly by sparkles on some of the tops and the lead vocalist being barefoot, but not too bad.

In terms of sound they're fairly standard black metal. They had a keyboard, which was prominent but not dominant, and fairly good melodies. I was not sure about the vocalist. When he was doing the classic black metal grimming, it was great, no problem, and even the occasional move into pompous operatic style vocals worked quite well. What didn't work for me was the more old school metal wailing, which seemed weak and off key, but maybe he'll improve. At the end he invited some girl on stage (apart from some pink stripes in her hair you'd never guess she was into metal, but for all I know she could be a major player in the Taipei scene) but either her voice was weak or the mic was turned down too low because she didn't seem to add much to the sound.

In fact in general the sound quality was not great, but none of the bands had much time to set up so I'm not sure if this was their fault or the festival's. Whatever the reason, I couldn't make out any standout songs, riffs or otherwise. There didn't seem to be any distinctive feel to them that set the apart. On the other hand, while I felt I could be at any local black metal gig in the world, it wasn't a bad metal gig. They had the balance of instruments down pretty well, there were different dynamics, and the vocals were varied. Despite not standing out, songs were not samey and didn't seem derivative, at least not of any one particular band, and they seemed to be trying stuff out, so there seemed to have a lot of potential.

So, if you're in Taiwan and they have a gig on they'd definitely put on a decent show, and maybe if you hear of them in a few years time, hopefully with a better English name, they could well be worth checking out more seriously. For the moment though, I wouldn't spend too much time or money on getting a CD if you're not at one of their gigs already.


Emerging From The Cocoon

From listening online (and the awesomeness of the name) the band I was more excited about was Emerging From The Cocoon, whom I had seen mentioned on Taipei Metal and other places. I'd seen them hanging around the day before - I didn't know it was them but I assumed they must be a metal band because they were dressed all in black, most of them with long black hair, and a couple had T-shirts - I'm not sure for which band but it may have been Behemoth since they came here a few months ago. Then on Sunday they were wearing their own T-shirts (and baseball cap) with a suitably brutal and indecipherable logo, and handing out free demo CDs to get people to come.

Well at first I thought they had shitty stage presence because they just went on stage  and started playing, fairly still, but it seemed these first two songs were just to sound check. They gave the sound guys a CD and atmospheric intro music started, escalating into screams - I'm sure this would be awesome at night with a darkened stage, but the effect was a bit lost at 5 in the afternoon under tropical sun in a park.

And then there was metal \m/ \m/! Awesome riffs that overcame the poor sound quality, sudden well executed time changes, brutal drumming and all held together tightly with plenty of on stage movement. The vocals were also awesome, ranging from a classic death/grind growl to black metal screeching, and occasionally a sound like a pig being slaughtered, half the time with the guy's hair fully over his face so he looked like the girl in Ring.

Pure brutal death metal was what EFTC seem to be aiming for, and it's what they deliver pretty well. There were crazy insane fast bits, good headbanging riffs in between, everything you want really. Admittedly you could be at a death metal gig pretty much anywhere in the world, but it would be a good death metal gig - maybe not Behemoth, but a very good local DM band who would have a decent following.

And even in Taiwan, they seem to have one. For a festival dominated by indie, quite a sizable crowd gathered to watch them. Some were probably just drawn by curiosity (in the case of some foreigners there, possibly to take the piss by their over the top cheers, or maybe they were just drunk), but others seemed to have come specially to see them, and many stayed until the end. There was no mosh pit or even much headbanging, perhaps because of the heat.

It was a good set, and they're well worth checking out online or better still live. If they carry on like this in a few years I think they could be as big as Chthonic, at least within Taiwan.

BB Bomb

Luckily I like indie too, as otherwise I'd have been pretty annoyed with only two metal bands playing 45 minutes each. There were also a couple of good punk bands which I'll briefly review here since I think the line between punk and metal is or should be blurred.

My favourite was BB Bomb (BB彈). I missed them last year because of the lack of a decent program, and since then from what I remember they have changed a bit. I was under the impression they were an all girl outfit, but now it seems they're two guys and a girl.

he is the singer and guitarist though, and they play really good, catchy but not too catchy, riot grrrl style dirty fast punk. No over indulgence in lengthy songs, being cute or anything here, its short, sharp and screamy. Her voice isn't great but its perfect for the music. If you like punk, go see them, they're by far the best punk band I've heard in Taiwan, and deserve to become an international cult band.

Inquiry 104

Surprisingly Taiwan is not collectively addicted to pop-punk, which you'd think would suit people here rather well. But if you want a fix of catchy, melodic, poppy punk you could do a lot worse than this band.  Inquiry 104 (查號104) include 3 brothers. They sing pretty well, do cool moves on stage (including sunchronised steps and jumps), have fun catchy riffs and interact with the audience.

Other bands

Last year the trend was for "post" bands - post-rock, post-metal, post-emo, post-britpop and even post-post - which just means instrumental. There weren't so many this year, or at least I didn't go to watch as many, but two good ones are Sun of Morning (晨曦光廊) and Bugs of Phonon (聲子蟲) . Another couple of bands in the indie/punk/rock genres that I missed or only caught the end of but sounded good online were The Broken Flowers (碎紙花 ) and Cherryboom (櫻桃幫 ).

Of the "foreigner bands" (bands made up of foreigners here for work, study etc.) one of the best is Divebomb. Personally I wouldn't bother seeing them at a festival if there was anything else on because they play in Tainan a lot, and in the two years I've been here I don't think their set has changed. They have 3 songs I recognise, one about watching someone pee, one about how the drummer looks like Orlando Bloom (he doesn't), and one about fucking a cat. Yes, they're punk. Good fun to watch, and make a great night out. Much better than the other "foreigner bands" like Dr Eggs or Sons of Homer, who are both shit.

The best band at Spring Scream this year though was one called Matzka (瑪斯卡), an aboriginal reggae band from Taidong. Fantastic musicians, they blend aboriginal harmonies with reggae and elements of hiphop, and it works really well.

OK, that's it for my review of Spring Scream 2010, I'm not going to review every band. This week or next week I'll start reviewing some albums - I have two Chthonic records and the EFTC promo I got at the festival, so plenty to get on with.