Folk rock band Low Wormwood is back with their newest album The Watcher
We mean this in the nicest possible way, but Low Wormwood are not sexy. We’re not talking about their physical appearance - after all, plenty of people dig the whole mellow hippie vibe - but as a band, they’re not the kind of guys who you’ll catch striking poses on stage or diving into crowds full of screaming girls. If there’s one phrase that describes Low Wormwood’s stage presence, it’s ‘low-key’ - which is about what you’d expect from four dudes who, despite having become one of the biggest folk-rock acts in China, still refuse to move out of their hometown.
‘Everybody asks us about that,’ says frontman Liu Kun from his home in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province in China’s northwest. ‘Big cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, they have their good points. But I think quality of life is really important. Because a lot of the people living in these cities are rootless - they’re just drifting.’
Roots, as it happens, are an important part of Low Wormwood’s music, as anyone who listened to their third album, Lanzhou Lanzhou, can attest. ‘Since we all grew up here, Lanzhou has taught us everything - and our music definitely reflects that,’ Liu says. ‘When people listen to our music, they can tell that this is a sound that came out of Lanzhou, out of the northwest.
’Yet for guys with ambition - as Low Wormwood surely are - living outside of one of China’s established musical centres isn’t just a lifestyle choice, it’s a statement. As a rule, bands from the boondocks don’t have the easiest time making it big in China, which is why so many young bands up and move as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
But Low Wormwood’s success has never sprung from their proximity to trends. It’s been a slow burn for the band, which started in 2006 and broke out nationwide in 2011 with the release of Lanzhou Lanzhou. Even today it remains a source of inspiration, not to mention an anchor for their creative lives. ‘We have our families here, our jobs here - staying here is a way for us to maintain our inner lives,’ Liu says. ‘It’s a way to maintain a kind of quietness, a rhythm to our lives. It’s a way to maintain our energy for making music.
’It’s proven a fruitful approach for the band; over the past seven years they have developed steadily, and always with an eye turned toward the world around them. ‘When the four of us started, we all had different tastes, but we shared a common philosophy toward music and what it should do,’ Liu says, ‘so later on we were able to come together over that.’ That approach turned out to be one of their greatest strengths: an almost anthropological attention to the lives of the people around them, with details big and small.
This was among the elements that made Lanzhou Lanzhou such a success, and ultimately the album that established them as one of China’s leading folk-rock bands. Weaving infectious melodies with closely observed scenes of everyday life, Lanzhou Lanzhou proved evocative, intimate and earthy, filled with understated ballads that plucked the heartstrings of young people, whether they were nostalgic for home, or yearning for the romance of another place.
It wasn’t just instinct that led them in this direction, but an intentional conceptual approach. ‘Music isn’t just about revealing the reality of society, but should also address something bigger - like love, for example,’ Liu Kun says. ‘Something that explores the China that we’re living in today, that addresses the world at large. It’s about being attentive to the inner lives of the people around us, about what they’re thinking, about love, about caring.About the physical state as well as their mental state of people in China.
’This is especially true for their most recent album, The Watcher, which the band is launching this month with a country-wide tour. Though Liu says The Watcher will feature a more delicate aesthetic than its predecessor, the album promises to be a somewhat more brutal assessment of China’s current reality: ‘This one is more focused on what’s going on in China, on what’s going on with young people, on society and the world,’ Liu says. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the cover of the album, a deceptively cheerful painting of a figure on a hill extending his arms toward a setting sun. It was drawn, Liu says, by the child of a man in jail for murder.
‘It goes back to this particuiar story - a common story in China. There was this vendor who sold barbecue on the street, and had a run-in with a chengguan [municipal officials paid to crack down on street vendors], They fought, and the vendor ended up killing the chengguan. He was arrested and is still awaiting trial. Right now he’s in prison without any way to see his family.’ The band’s goal, Liu says, isn’t to act as social critics, but rather to highlight the stories of individuals - to give a face to the kinds of widespread problems that are so often discussed in the abstract. But the band also had another reason for choosing this cover: ‘I think their situation is analogous to ours. The kid and his mother, all they can do is wait for the father. Likewise, all we can do is keep watch and wait for things in China to change. So we called it The Watcher.’
Source: Time Out Beijing