Cloudy With A Chance Of Catharsis
No Party for Cao Dong, "The Servile"
This post has a bit of backstory. A couple of years ago, I got the all-clear from Bandcamp Daily to cover No Party for Cao Dong’s long-awaited sophomore album, The Clod. As hard as I tried, though, I couldn’t track down the band for an interview. Without that interview, Bandcamp opted to kill the piece, which ultimately never saw the light of day (although more happily, it was also the moment where I learned “kill fees” are a thing). I’d already started writing the intro though, an adapted version of which is below. And although The Clod is a good record, I decided to restructure this as a feature for NPfCD’s debut album, which remains the best entry point into their music. My suspicion is that, while NPfCD is Very Big in Taiwan, most people outside of Asia haven’t encountered them yet. If that includes you, consider this your formal introduction.
A little less than ten years ago, a Taiwanese band called No Party for Cao Dong released their debut album. The band was composed largely of members from a different group called Party on Cao Dong Street, renamed with a cheeky reference to a past form from which it was now separating. The album, which was called The Servile, was released in February 2016; in 2017, it was nominated for Album of the Year by the Golden Melody Awards (Taiwan’s version of the Grammy’s). The band itself would take home the coveted “Best Band” and “Best New Artist” awards that year. In 2021, tickets to their concert at the 11,000-seat Taipei Arena sold out in minutes. Before long, fans had jokingly re-dubbed the band “No Tickets for Cao Dong.”
NPfCD’s success came in part from recognizing that, in the age of the online playlist, rock fans no longer cared so much about “rock” being a hard genre. “Music seems to be categorized less often by genre but rather mood, feelings or emotions,” they noted in a past interview with Wonderland magazine. While many artists exercised this stylistic freedom by mixing multiple influences into new and off-beat sub-genres, NPfCD decided to keep their influences distinct when they combined them, allowing their songs to morph from one genre to the next with the fluidity of a tropical weather pattern.
That doesn’t mean those songs are exercises in randomness. NPfCD may have pulled in ideas from a broader constellation of styles than many of their peers, but they anchored their eclecticism around a two-part structure that would become a hallmark of their songs: a Quiet Part and a Loud Part. The Quiet Part is where much of the innovation happens, with NPfCD ricocheting from post-rock to acoustic guitar to indie dance à la Two Door Cinema Club. On the whole, it works. NPfCD fans like the Quiet Part; they vibe with the Quiet Part; they might even dance to the Quiet Part.
But they’re there for the Loud Part. Or, more specifically, they’re there for the moment when the Quiet Part unexpectedly swings into the Loud Part, when NPfCD rips their songs’ complacent weather to shreds in a storm of guitars and raw emotion. The dramatic contrast between these two elements accentuates a specific type of catharsis, one that will resonate with anyone who’s ever needed to stifle an internal scream of rage because modern convention dictated that it wasn’t the time or place to let it out. NPfCD is screaming, and they’re inviting you to scream with them.
