The Importance of Being Indie: Reviewing Little Shy on Allen Street’s Suffering
6 Dec 2022
As one of the most low-profile bands in Taiwan, Little Shy on Allen Street sneakily released their second album Suffering with very little marketing exposure. In spite of the members’ extensive activities in the music industry, the band has attracted rather few fans—I even doubt if they deliberately make the size of their audience manageable to ensure higher fan loyalty. Nevertheless, Suffering is as decent as their previous works and deserves to rank among the best new releases of 2022. It’s nothing like those disposable commodities prevailing in the market; instead, the album worths hours and hours of replay, and with each cycle its enchantment but strengthens.
What differentiates Little Shy on Allen Street from other bands, I would say, is a sense of intimacy and familiarity. Their music sounds as though a greeting from an old friend—particularly the one with whom you’d enjoy together listening to Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire or Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Like these artists, Little Shy on Allen Street never obey to the so-called fashion in terms of style. They instead pay tribute to, once again, the seemingly outdated indie rock genre, letting the audience know that there can always be more to be created and discovered even if such an era—when numerous things have drifted away in the flow of massive multimedia.
One important thing that was gone is verse. Studies have revealed that the duration of intro and verse has significantly decreased for the last decade thanks to the mechanisms of streaming platforms. A nicely composed verse, however, works better than anything else in enriching the chorus, to which too much attention has been paid in pursuit of commercial success. From the opening tracks of Suffering, audience would hear no sign of rushing into the upcoming stanza, but a rather slow-paced and yet appealing style of narrative. Their tempo flows elegantly like a long dance, with which the tracks complete beautiful stories one after another.
“Sunshine” perfectly demonstrates the charm of such style. The four-minute-long track consists a long verse that lasts for two minutes, a repetitive sentence that represents the chorus, and a long, lingering musical stanza. Such structure corresponds to the story: the protagonist experiences a magical moment while encountering sunshine during a meditative ride. With the process of arrangement, audience can easily imagine the scene described in the lyrics and project self into the story.
I also enjoy the swift, playful melodies in “Void,” the vocal-less track that marks a pause shortly before the album reaches its end. Instead of fancy riffs, the arrangement adopts a variety of broken chords to structure the entire track in a relaxing manner, which makes the musical flow fluent. Even if “Void” might not leave as much first impression as some other pieces that feature catchy melodies, it serves as if an inspirational seasoning touch that further fulfils the album as an entity. These words may also apply to the other songs of Little Shy on Allen Street—in spite of the little usage of popular elements, they manage to create different sparkles that make their music sound but fashionable.
That’s why Suffering is an album that certainly deserves more attention. Having a complex multimedia ecosystem nowadays, we don’t really need powerful stimulations to stuff our senses. Listening to Little Shy on Allen Street drives me back to the beginning of the century, when the centralised music industry not yet collapsed but had already expanded as diversely as possible. Until now, I find the works created in the period worthwhile revisiting because they somehow applied new thoughts to the decades-old traditional techniques. Even though some consider the indie rock genre but a transition between the 90s and modern pop music, it appears to me as a pioneer of the digital era, and its significance still goes on as music continuously evolves.
I would say the album delivers a reminder of being indie even in the 2020s. The core idea of the genre—as well as its numerous branches—emphasises the composer’s will while creating songs, and Little Shy on Allen Street is a qualified spokesman of the concept. It’s time to put aside those clichés that the majority listeners find modern and consequently refer to as fashion. Journey an hour with the band—their music will refresh your ears from suffering.