Sugar Plum Ferry

It’s easy to get lost in Sugar Plum Ferry’s third and latest release, Islands On The Ocean of The Mind (????), the title of which suits their post-rock sound. The album’s six tracks blend into one another through droning rhythms, melodic themes that ebb and flow and recurring waves of electric guitar distortion and crashing drums that wash the melodies away.
The four-piece band, which formed in Taipei in the late 1990s, makes instrumental rock with a cinematic flavor. On Islands, they pick up where they left off from 2007’s Thank You for Reminding Me, in which the CD cover suggested a theme in a snippet of text that read “There’ll be one day we human beings can fly, one day we wear out our shadows.”
That day arrives on Islands. The liner notes consist of more cryptic prose describing how “we got rid of our shadows” and experienced “the joy of freedom.” Along with the album art — graphic novel-like illustrations of an oceanside city seen from a bird-eye’s view and towering buildings that look like concrete forests — this is perhaps one way to make sense of the urgent tempo of the first track, False Awakening (???).
But true to post-rock form, Sugar Plum Ferry is all about soundscapes rather than words. Deerfield at Dusk (????) begins with a quiet, lulling melody on a electric guitar, and builds layer by layer into a dramatic chorus voiced by a horn ensemble. The song shifts back and forth between quiet and loud and sparse and lush.
There is a sad undertone to the entire album, which gets massaged by steady, deliberate grooves from the band’s two guitarists, who switch between slow and dreamy melodic lines and metronome-like strumming. The effect is emotionally numbing on People, People (???).
The album’s best track, Night Celestials (???), flirts with black metal and grunge and is one instance where the band’s normally measured temperament threatens to explode. - Taipei Times

Maybe it sounds pretentious to talk about pretentious music this way, but sometimes it feels that instrumental rock is too self-aware. In other words, some artists in the genre have gone to the nth degree to perfect and display their technical skill, and while this can pay off and be appreciated in numerous ways, the emotional side of the music is left strangely unaddressed-- a paradox of sorts given the style of music at hand where sinewy waves and soil-shifting crashes of guitar are designed to peel away your flesh and make your heart go awry. Given this, it’s refreshing to discover a collective of artists who not only avoid the above-mentioned pitfall, but also don’t simply launch themselves to the opposite side of the spectrum and ignore the mechanics of sound. Compromise may seem like a strange word to use here, but it helps spark an understanding of exactly what Sugar Plum Ferry has achieved on their second full-length, a 5-song, hour long exploration of poignant instrumental soundscapes, balanced with engaging, powerful, technical grace.

Problems are bound to arise on a disc that’s shortest song is just under 10 minutes, but SPF has done a profound job of making sure every moment used serves a purpose for the listener. “One Third Cradle Song" is the perfect launching pad for the entire album and illuminates this principle well. Guitar work that could melt snow introduces us to a track that thrives on light and balmy percussion to bloom: post-rock photosynthesis. A subtle poppiness carries the bass line well past the mid-point of the song, and while “happiness� is a vague tag to slap on a song, you really can’t help but feel a swarm of it surround you when the track tumbles into an early Spring tumult, a quick illustration (and convincer) of what this three-piece from Taipei is capable of.

“Uproar From Riverside Buildings� follows suit, honing in on the rock part of instrumental rock, with quick, quirky builds that somersault along with upbeat, jovial harmonies. Again, the length of the song does not distract from its content, as every second seems to sway and pulse with a distinct energy. “Southern Butterfly Patch� suits its name, as guitars and flute melt into another sunlit melody, with hushed percussion giving the tune a bit of a boost from the backside. As the song builds, the percussion transforms into a subtle marching rhythm, pulling itself to the forefront, and guides the listener between instrumental choruses. It’s not so much the quiet/loud/quiet pattern we’re accustomed to, as the song maintains a balanced, sanguine intensity throughout its length, until the final two minutes where things start to crash, clang, and unfold into a mess of brilliant controlled chaos.

Things change up a bit with “Graverobber’s Abyss,� the second to last track. The song stays true to form with a 13-minute length, but avoids any other semblance to the prior tracks, discarding coherent melody and instead exploring intricate, layered guitar work. This is a prime example where the technical abilities of SPF become wonderfully obvious; bold, varied passages clash and clatter with each other on the surface, while the light, delicate guitar lines take a back seat, but still provide direction for the song. It’s a track that resonates with completeness-- mechanically strong, emotionally fulfilling. The disc ends with it’s longest piece: a 20 minute finale that encapsulates parts and pieces from the earlier songs and melds them into one, winding, epic piece that ends with vocal melodies that parallel the tranquility present in the enlivened, warm instrumental refrains throughout. The diversity of the track lends to a loss of fluidity, but the overwhelming amount of patterns present here makes the entire experience simply enjoyable.

The best way to imagine SPF is as a collective of architects basking in the sun on some lazy afternoon, furiously drawing up extensive blueprints for each composition. Once the outline, the basics of construction, are complete the band becomes residents of their own design, injecting and designing each room (read song) with unique personality and character. Instead of simply churning out songs and records, you have a group that has taken the time to live in their own design, refine it, understand it, and present it to us as a piece of themselves, not just a chunk of sound that follows flimsy genre rules and happens to sound pretty.

-Jonathan Brooks - http://thesilentballet.com/