The Helpline - Time is on My Side

Welcome to Bandcamp Notes, a free music discovery newsletter published by Bandcamp.

The Helpline is a special issue of Bandcamp Notes devoted to answering your most burning music-related queries. Browse past issues here. Got a question? Drop a comment and we (might) get back to you.

Today, we help a fan trying to binge listen their way through a long flight and another in search of a now-endangered type of album: the grower.

I’m ​going to ​be on ​a flight for 20 ​hours ​and ​I don’t ​like ​podcasts! Can you please recommend an artist discography, ​a genre, ​a ​label catalog, ​or ​any other musical “binge listening” experience ​that ​will ​make the time fly?

-Mel

Are you a fan of indie’s DIY spirit and post-punk experimentation? Then may I recommend a selection of Chinese indie music for your flight. You’ll likely not have heard much—if any—and for a good reason: Rock music arrived in China late. The Chinese government had strict regulations on Western cultural imports that prevented rock music from gaining a foothold in the country until the late-1980s.

It wasn’t until dakou, the mass import of unwanted CDs into China as plastic waste, that created a gateway for Chinese youth to hear rock music. The “dakou generation” were people that loved the music they heard through these CDs so much that they became musicians, formed bands, and created a wave of underground indie rock music across China. Thus, Chinese indie music may feel familiar, but it’s powerful to hear these bands work it out on their own divorced from Western context and culture.

Carsick Cars are the most prominent band out of Beijing’s indie scene, and they caught their big break opening for Sonic Youth in 2007. The guitar chords from front-man Zhang Shouwang barrel forwards with trusty post-punk propulsion, but the trio love noise more than melody, as heard in the extended breakdown of “Zhong Nan Hai.”

Carsick Cars’s debut was released on Maybe Mars, the Beijing label co-founded by economics professor Michael Pettis and P.K.14 frontman Yang Haisong. Like Carsick Cars, Nanjing-formed, Beijing-based P.K.14’s music is post-punk through and through, with Haisong’s tormented vocals creating a chaotic vortex as it struggles over the din created by the rest of the band.

One of P.K.14’s drummers, Hua Dong, eventually helped form Re-TROS (Rebuilding the Rights of Statues). Re-TROS’s second album, Before the Applause, was released in 2017 and demonstrates the rapid growth of indie music in China, fusing together rock with synthesizers in a manner that’s reminiscent of the avant-garde sound of krautrock.

-Marshall Gu

When I was a kid, I only had enough money from my part-time job to buy one record a month. So even if I ended up buying a record I didn’t like at first, I had to keep listening to it, because that was my only new record for another month. I got into some of my favorite records that way, like The Top by The Cure. What’s an album today that took you a few listens to really get into?

-Deep Listener

To be perfectly honest, I would say most albums take a few spins to get under my skin these days, unless they’re one of those rare gems that happen to dazzle me from the jump. Those gems do exist, of course, but more often than not, I need to size things up before the sparks start flying, and listen to the album in different locations: my desk, my car, at the gym. That kind of thing.

Instant gratification is the default mode of the extremely online and distracted, but more and more of us are starting to find the joy and benefits in slowing the fuck down. Taking your time over an album and letting it gradually burrow itself into your brain—or not—can be a wonderful thing. Some albums are meant to be predictable and comfortable; others are there to challenge expectations and unearth emotions or complex feelings that had lain dormant until then. Some completely pass over your head, and that’s also fine.

Case in point: American Football’s 1999 self-titled debut (LP1) is among my favorite albums of all time, compounded by its position on my music timeline as a coming-of-age album (when I was 19, my ex-boyfriend burned the album on a CD with all the track titles written neatly out in all caps). So when LP4 turned up in March (the band’s first album in seven years), it was a classic case of being instantly turned off by an album that didn’t exactly sound like the original you hold so dear.

One of the charms of American Football is arguably its duality of minimalism and complexity. LP4 fills the room with more gusto while at the same time feels even more e-m-o-t-i-o-n-a-l on account of the dreamily romantic vocals that swell to the skies. Then there are brow-furrowing lyrical themes about mortality and getting older. However, the twinkling guitars, mournful trumpet, instrumental back-and-forths, and percussive complexities remain present and correct. After four or five listens, I realized it is still American Football, just different. Now they’re lamenting divorces instead of college breakups. Every artist (well, most of them) deserves the chance at a new lease of artistic life, and sometimes you just need a minute.

-April Clare Welsh