City Weather Sailing

As Always, Stellar Work From China's Brightest Stars

     

The P.K.14 team never lets us down on the strength of their songwriting, and this record brings it to a wider audience full-force. I saw them live in Shanghai on their 2007 summer tour (they're workhorses and frequently on the road, catch them if you can) when this material was in its embryonic stages, and I'm glad this is its final form: great, tightly-wound, melodic, frenetic - everything that makes their live shows such triumphs is here, polished until you can see your face in the shine. "Let Things Slide" manages to slam a great deal of ornate instrumentation into a post-punk framework: think Sonic Youth writing a James Bond theme. "Some Surprises Come Too Soon" and "How Majestic Is The Night" balance out their punk-ish roots in Nanjing with their incredible ears for pop melody, much like early Wire or mid-period Talking Heads, to whom they are most often compared. The only disappointment is "Behind All Ruptures," which surfaced last summer as "0000000001," a despairingly glorious anthem of isolation, here buried under one production trick too many. A few songs suffer similarly under the intrusion of the instrumental choices, but only "Ruptures" really succumbs. The songwriting shines through, and they strike just the right balance between the despair of their early demos and the White Paper LP and the pent-up punk energy behind the Whoever, Whoever, and Whoever LP. This isn't just "the best of Chinese alternative," this is a record that has such appeal that if one of their famed post-punk "mentors" (Martin Atkins of PiL, Mike Watt, etc) took a chance and secured them a distribution deal, they'd see an immediate and gratifying return on their investment. The world beyond China deserves to hear P.K.14.