Wang Wen – Sweet Home, Go!

For those post rock aficionados searching for similar bands to Mogwai or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, it’s probably unlikely you would head to China (even from an internet search perspective, aside from jumping on a plane). But if you did you’d find a blossoming post rock movement with some really interesting bands, and you’d likely stumble across the name Wang Wen fairly quickly. The Dalian-based band in southern China have a reputation for being one of the hardest working acts in their country, and they’ve reached an impressive 9th album, released very soon after an excellent collaborative soundtrack performance in September with cinematographer Cheng Ran entitled In Course of the Miraculous.

Their new album, entitled Sweet Home, Go! (which even sounds like a post rock release) is a beautifully written and sprawling 1 hour 15 minutes of complex noise spread over an inevitably sparse 7 tracks. ‘Netherworld Water’ opens the fun with a familiar ‘slow cooker’ approach to songwriting. After the quietest of openings, which leave you reaching for your volume dial, the instruments are slowly added, firstly a simple guitar line before a pizzicato cello joins in. The cellist at times plucks so hard you can hear the string slap into the fingerboard, a deliberate detail that adds to the texture of the developing sounds.

It’s five minutes before drums are added and the music blossoms (rather than explodes) into life, letting us hear the true strength of Wang Wen’s music  the warmth of the musical arrangements. Blissful tunes arranged between the guitars and brass previal, before a cello duet takes over and builds the track to an even greater level of intensity. It’s a lovely opening piece of music which doesn’t feel overly long at 15 minutes. ‘Red Wall Black Wall’ launches more directly into a heavier theme and here the shades of darkness and light are explored, again the cello the star of the show, beautiful melancholy tunes that peak through the guitars and the instrumental wall of sound.

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The centrepiece of the album is the extraordinary ‘Heart of Ocean’, which in many ways bring to mind the similarly titled ‘Heart Machine’ by wonderful (Norwegian) post-progressive band Major Parkinson. This is a track able to conjure the most extraordinary images, depicting a journey to the darkest depth of the sea. The early stages show signs of menace, with bursts of offbeat sounds interrupting the gentle musical theme in a style similar to Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’, but the music opens up into a far more delicate section. Here, the journey continues as if through beautiful coral, all forms of colourful life happily co-existing, with the trumpet, guitar and cello shaping the music. As the track builds the story gets darker, heading into grey and murky territories before finding what lies at the heart of the ocean  in this case, apparently a herd of angry, stampeding sea creatures, a cross between Brontosaurus and the Loch Ness Monster.

While you may think this is an imagination gone wild, or question the practicality of such creatures living in communal herds or indeed at the bottom of the ocean, or even doubt the very existence of Loch Ness Monster, the fact that such vivid images are conjured from an instrumental track is a great demonstration of just how powerful and clever Wang Wen’s music really is.

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Following this behemoth, ‘Lost in the 21st Century’ takes the music in a slightly different direction, perhaps more progressive in its intent, whilst the excellent title track ‘Sweet Home, Go!’ opens with competing glockenspiels beating out a Steve Reich-type minimalist rhythm, before some distinct Chinese influenced sounds takes the music appropriately back home, with a beautiful fusion of sounds to conclude the album.

In Sweet Home, Go!, Wang Wen have produced an interesting and diverse album which should delight many. This isn’t the album to single-handedly convert post rock non-believers, if anything the self-indulgent slow-burning tracks will infuriate even further, but this is gloriously written music. In classical terms, it would be Bruckner in its scale and Rachmaninov in its beauty, with more than enough subtlety and depth to allow repeated listens. Wang Wen are rightly at the forefront of an interesting crop of Chinese bands, and Sweet Home, Go! is amongst the best new post rock albums released in the last 12 months.

Sweet Home, Go! is out now and you can buy it from the Wang Wen Bandcamp page.