Carsick Cars
You Can Listen You Can Talk

The Carsick Cars are a Chinese rock band formed in Beijing in 2005, offspring of an underground scene, the Beijing one, of relatively recent birth, but in constant growth. Rock in China is a young genre, which has only recently crossed the well-known political barriers that for a long time have segregated this country from any kind of contact with "Western" culture, and which has taken a long time to break through at a cultural level in Chinese society, unlike other musical genres of more immediate accessibility that had already long dominated the scenes of environments orbiting around the Chinese world, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, and which now storm the music market of China itself.

The Carsick Cars often play live in the numerous alternative nights that animate the venues of Beijing, sometimes appearing unexpectedly at events where they are not expected, and are appreciated not only by the Chinese audience but also by the increasingly numerous foreigners residing here. The guitar-bass-drums trio is characterized by always powerful sounds, at times made gritty by distortions and dissonant guitar riffs, and paced by a solid and pressing bass, but they never abandon a melodic structure with a pop background of a never banal craftsmanship; all enriched by numerous short experimental live improvisations conducted by the charismatic leader of the band, the singer-guitarist Zhang Shouwang.

"You Can Listen You Can Talk" is the band's second album, recorded in the United States in 2009. The title suggests explicit content that in reality does not appear. The Chinese artist, faced with the necessity of not seeing their work fall under the attention of censorship, is forced to resort to an alternative expressive language, often made of metaphors, which sometimes leads to hermeticism. This tendency had already emerged in the band's first album, all sung in Chinese, particularly in tracks like "Guangchang" ("Square"), or "ZhongNanHai," a famous brand of Chinese cigarettes, but also the name of the residence of many important party members; a tendency that comes back even in this album, sung half in English, in tracks like the overwhelming opener "Tamen De Yi Yuan" ("One of Them"), a piece with which the Carsick Cars open most of their concerts, or the title track "You Can Listen You Can Talk," where they, drawing from the rich Chinese tradition, cite a writing from the early twentieth century by the writer Luxun, a key figure of modern Chinese literature, offering a startling snapshot of society, proposing a contemporary key reading.

Ultimately, the Carsick Cars are a band that does not bring substantial innovations to the international rock scene, but whose interest derives from the context from which they come and to which they belong. On one side, they represent a beautiful hope for the future of the Chinese underground music scene, still decidedly immature. On the other side, they are fundamentally a group of three guys with something personal to say, opinions to share, who have found rock as the vehicle to do so, through anger, irony, and poetry, in a context where saying something, speaking, can indeed be considered a revolutionary act.