On the Record: Backspace and Disparate Sensibilities

On the Record is your guide to the past, present, and future of Beijing's music scene. 

Backspace

Name: Backspace

Current Lineup: Zheng Dong (Vocals/Guitar), Ahui (Guitar), Guagua (Bass), Mao Te (Drummer)

Established: 2016

Record(s): 1 full-length

Label(s): Maybe Mars

Influences: Neu!, Television, Talking Heads, Led Zeppelin

Stream: Bandcamp (Maybe Mars), Douban

Who are they: On the face of it, surf rock and post-punk should be at odds with each other. One basks in sun-drenched melodies and glistening leads while the other traffics in brooding, perforated beats with blistering bass lines. It’s the golden beaches of Los Angeles during the summer of ’66 versus the dreary back alleys of Manchester in 1979. To imagine a world in which surf rock and post-punk coexist is to imagine a world in which Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis – aside from being equally visionary musicians – have anything in common. It’s an imaginative leap that’s seemingly out of reach, and yet on their 2018 debut Human Nature Architecture, Backspace sails across that chasm with proverbial flying colors. 

That’s not to say you should expect Pet Sounds’ arrangements or anything as caustic as Unknown Pleasures, but you will find an aesthetic veneer that is pleasantly familiar while remaining utterly unique. 

The manifesto that is Human Nature Architecture is basically written within the first 57 seconds of the record, as the band outlines in a bullet-point fashion of ten-second bursts their krautrock, surf rock, post-punk, and noise rock ideologies, before vocalist Zheng Dong quite literally gives voice to the cause. What follows is a 45 minute-long double exposure, in which that sunny Southern California aesthetic is superimposed over a foggy backwater town in the UK. 

Ripping through the middle of the record is “Digital Image,” a song that opens and closes with a pulsating rhythm section and sonic swells that give way to wavy riffs and a climb up the guitar neck reminiscent of The Surfaris’ iconic vocal opening on “Wipeout.” Meanwhile, “Another Body” is a slow-burning psychedelic daydream that digs its claws in over a well-paced six minutes, ultimately dragging you through a surrealist landscape, not unlike the album’s cover art. Thread throughout the entirety of the record is a scathing narrative about the pitfalls of modernity and humanity’s self-induced isolation, a population adrift in a sea of vapid technological "progress" and misplaced meaning. However, as the album’s liner notes so succinctly puts it, Human Nature Architecture “isn’t so much a cry for help as it is a rallying cry into the abyss that is our mind.” 

READ: SNSOS and the Art of Genre Weaving

Images: courtesy of Backspace