醜奴兒 (The Servile) - Indie re-imaged
When to Listen: When you need some energy with soul
Accesability: Accessible (other than the language barrier)
TLDR: A moving album of frustration, switching between rock, post rock and hardcore
No Party for Cao Dong is an interesting band, that I assume most people (in the west) have not heard of. Hailing from Taiwan and only having one album to date they have came on to the music scene with the same fire their music encapsulates - a firework in the eastern music scene, ultimately winning several awards for best album and single, before being halted by the ongoing pandemic and the untimely death of their drummer Fan Fan.
Their debut album 醜奴兒 is a master class in modern indie music. It captures the rage and angst of the modern generation, with tradition and society expectations. The album opens with 3 songs ( Intro, 爛泥 (Grisly Me) and 勇敢的人 (Wimpish)) that all build to a strong crescendo of noise and anger. "Intro" is non lyrical - mostly chants and screams, building to a loud soundscape which lands in a more dance track of 爛泥. This song bounces around from dance and more mellow breakdowns ultimately then transitioning into 勇敢的人 - which starts slow but builds into a sound space of rage with a strong guitar lick in the end that ties out the song resolving in a quiet, subdued guitar that ends out the onslaught of the first 5 minutes of the album.
The next several songs of the album take on a more structured indie rock vibe, with Simon Says being the stand out song - a song about following the norms placed in front of you, and ultimately wanting to reject those and the past your elders have created. Its this rage and general eb and flow between post-rock in-between and post-core, close to scream-core chorus' that really set their sound apart. The album concludes on the song 情歌 (love song). The vocals are what makes this track, starting with a mellow singing, to a painful isolated screaming, building into a massive sonic crecendo, then reslolving back to a singular voice and base line, repeating this pattern over and over, finally resolving in a melocolic voice. This song speaks to rawness and cyclical nature of how one love ends, another can begin. When you look at the albums lyrics and sound you find an album about conflict and failed resolution. - constaly weaving between hope, love, frustration, apathy and anger and repeating endlessly. Framed in this context 情歌 becomes a fitting resolution for an album about the conflicted world we live in, while embracing it - creating a form of raw indi that could be better replicated across the world.