Playing a culturally unfamiliar sound of a land far, far away so effectively, Taiwanese band Sunset Rollercoaster managed to capture many Asian fans’ hearts with its unexpectedly heartfelt take on old American adult contemporary soul sounds. In Indonesia, the response to its unique music has reached fever pitch. 

The band recently visited Jakarta as part of its ongoing tour, which has taken it to countries such as Japan and Thailand, with dates in China to follow. Organized by local music collective Noisewhore, Sunset Rollercoaster managed to cram the Rossi Musik auditorium in Fatmawati, South Jakarta, to full capacity. 

Tickets for the band’s performance sold out weeks before it played the two-weekend series, in which Noisewhore also invited Canadian indie rock band Peach Pit and Singaporean noise rock band Subsonic Eye. 

Most of what it played was based on material from its excellent 2017 Jinji Kikko, an EP which serves as a rightful successor to the synthy 1980s vibes given off by relatively uncool oldies acts like Hall and Oates and Chicago, but mixed with “cool” shoegaze and post-rock tendencies. 

It is fairly surprising to find out that a band from the far reaches of Asia has managed to present the deep sounds of retro America so well, and more surprising is the fact that the only exposure that the band had toward these sounds were just their musical curiosities. 

In that way, the band seems somewhat of an indie anomaly in its home ground compared to its peers. 

Sunset’s vocalist and guitarist Kuo explains that most Taiwanese indie bands that exist at the moment predominantly play the “mainstream indie” sounds of shoegaze, post-punk and noise rock, but the main difference is that most of them sing in Mandarin — something that Sunset Rollercoaster has never done before. 

English is not Kuo’s or any of the other members’ first language. As a matter of fact, Kuo is the only band member that is able to converse in English fluently. He credits part of his fluency to watching a lot of Sesame Street when he was growing up, and now he feels that singing and writing in English is much easier for him. 

“Even though English for me is an outsider thing, I can put a lot of my imagination into the language. Sometimes when I try to sing or write in Mandarin, I tend to think too much. In English, that would never happen,” he explains. 

“But maybe one day I’ll do something in Mandarin, when I find a way.” 

As he describes, there are only “around five” bands in the Taiwanese indie scene that currently sing in English.

The reason why Kuo feels Sunset Rollercoaster managed to gather a lot of fans at home and abroad so quickly is not only because of the English factor, but also because the band’s music is considered more pop-leaning than most of his peers, thereby making them more accessible and more easily understood by the general public. 

During its five-year hiatus, Sunset Rollercoaster underwent a drastic change of sound, which can be credited to its lineup change. Kuo and drummer Lo Tsun were joined by keyboardist Shao, percussionist Hao Chia and new bass player Hung Li sometime after they released their first album, Bossa Nova, in 2011. 

Bossa Nova was geared more toward a rockier sound, vibing straight up from both the heavy and soft sounds of The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo. But some songs off that album, including “I Know You Know I Love You” and “Queen” somehow serve as a foresight to their current sound found on Jinji Kikko.

For the band’s upcoming album, titled Casanova, it will expand further on the 1980s soul-funk influence of Jinji Kikko but will conceptually stay with the same story told on the EP. 

Mastered at Abbey Road Studios in London with the help of a friend studying there, Kuo says Casanova will follow the same love story told on Jinji Kikko,but from the opposite perspective. 

As a recurring word in the band’s music, the word “Jinji” is not something that he came up with, but was inspired from a song by bossa nova artist Antonio Carlos Jobim named “My Dindi”, which was then covered by jazz singer Jon Lucien. 

“My Jinji” is the first track off of Jinji Kikko, and presents itself as a chill, tropical indie pop number that then ends in a happily unexpected soul-drenched breakdown not unlike something you’d find at the end of a Steely Dan song. 

“[Lucien’s accent] sang ‘My Dindi’ as ‘My Jinji’. In this context, I concluded that Jinji must mean ‘baby’. So the whole EP is a love story about two lovers who were separated from each other but discovered that they can travel through time to find one another,” he elaborated. 

Sound-wise, the band aims to stick to the Jinji Kikko sound, but the end result, the front man describes, will in the end likely be nothing anyone would expect from the band, not even the members themselves. 

As they continue being a band, Sunset Rollercoaster vows to continue mixing in whatever it feels like and molding it into a result that works well. Like in Asian food, Asian bands today tend to stir-fry many sounds into one dish and come out with something delectable. It is a cultural aspect that Kuo is aware of. 

“Maybe the tendency to mix things together is an Asian thing. Bands from Japan, Indonesia, China and Thailand do this, I hear. We’re generally less bound by the rules of genre, so I guess it’s the rule of the future,” he says. 

“And now, we are all in the future too.”

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