Live Review from 21st Anniversary Festival Day 1:
1. (Cover / The Sundays) Here’s Where the Story Ends 6:00
2. At the End of the Rocky Road 2:49
3. Demo 1 – 3:35
4. Demo 2 – 6mins
5. 石沉大海 5:40
6. Demo 3 – 6:00
We love that when a part of the backdrop fell on Tofu Kingdom during their soundcheck, they laughed.
We love that they apparently debuted three new unnamed songs as part of a six-song festival set list.
Hell, we love that the lead singer submits her name as “Rita Whatever”, and that the band’s official profile picture on streaming services looks like something a six-year-old drew on Microsoft Paint. And we kinda love the name Tofu Kingdom, whatever-TF it’s meant to mean.
So we want to love Tofu Kingdom, a lot. But of course expectation rarely meets reality, and setting your own high bar will only disappoint.
We definitely didn’t love the muddy mix. In typical shoegaze style, the vocals are intentionally mixed super low on the recordings, but live we couldn’t hear bassist Jill Jill Chung’s voice at all – an epic fail, because we also love that this band is basically built around the skill and charisma of the two women vocalists. Sam Yu and Justin Kong just do what awkward, socially anxious guitarists have done since grunge made it OK – stare at their shoes and make majestic walls of sound. It’s integral to the project, but Rita and Jill Jill are bringing the songs – and the latter’s basslines are the crucial musical grounding that stops this whole retro circus wheel from teetering over in a fireball of reverb and regret.
Opening with a cover of The Sundays’ “Here’s Where the Story Ends” probably made sense on paper, and Whatever’s vocals definitely occupy the same sonic range as Harriet Wheeler’s. But it fell a little flat – perhaps we can blame the shoddy staging – and the following, short, jangly “At the End of the Rocky Road” felt perhaps too obviously in debt to what came before. In this mix of aloof indie whimsy and studious soundscaping, I was reminded a little of scene legends Teenage Riot.
Then came two unreleased demos which suggest the kingdom is expanding, as its empress slowly cracks up, freaking out with haunting reflections and nervy paranoia, coupled with a growing sense of megalomania. The first was a thrilling post-punk vignette built around an eight-chord jam, the second a frantic six-minute wig out of thrashed chords and feedback that doesn’t even have words yet.
This big risk was repaid with the relative safety of new single “石沉大海”, a slow, yearning shoegaze burner, before The Cranberries-esque future singalong “Demo III”, which we would have liked a lot more with a closer attention to melody.
– Rob Garratt
