Citizens of Ice-Cream: ‘The End’ review
By Chris Chew
Rating: 5/10
Having released just one demo in 2005, it’s rather unusual to find that Citizens of Ice-Cream’s first EP is titled The End. Rumours of the band disbanding had been circulating amongst the Malaysian indie scene for a little while, but have never really been confirmed. So is The End meant to signify an official announcement of the band’s dissipation?
No clue. Yet in some sense, it would be a mild shame. Citizens of Ice-Cream can barely claim to have ‘arrived’, yet they have earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the bands on the forefront of Malaysia’s Chinese indie scene. Theirs is a vastly intelligent brand of post-rock with an added knack for exotic Oriental melodies, somewhat akin to Explosions In The Sky meeting Ride during Chinese New Year. Strictly local, gorgeously global.
And yet a listen to The End is a strange exercise in managing expectations. As the band straddles between the cusp of greatness and the lure of oblivion, the EP bears a similar ambivalence, and a surprising lack of consistency. The songcraft could certainly do with a bit more top and tail tweaking so that those shimmering moments of magic are more evenly distributed. Opener ‘The Last Emperor’ (which also appeared on the 2005 demo but is noticeably more polished and sonically inflated here) drags around a succession of meandering melodies for three minutes, before the entrance of delicate, quick-picked single notes shatter the frostiness. ‘Parks and Funerals’ fares no better in its opening two-note twinkles, and the luminous synthwork lacks an equally adventurous guitar counterpoint—until the song’s emphatic coda, where guitars and keyboards frolic in a mystical, kinetic whirlpool of goodness.
The End also underscores the band’s never-ending thirst for fountains of freshness, and here they swing to the more drone-centric facets of shoegaze and Brit rock. But evidently, this aspect requires a smidgen more journeying. ‘Those Who Walk in Chaos’ employs a fleeting burst of jazz and funk chordings to trite effect, while ‘Life is Short’ and its uneventful mod-rock riffing is even more ineffectual. It is not until ‘Leave it to the Ants’ that the band successfully extrapolates those Cockney influences into a cohesive, functional equation capable of eliciting widespread “Eureka!”s, where new wave rhythms find solitude amidst a reverb-dense neighbourhood.
Thankfully, the title track and closer is a fitting conclusion. It has two acts spread over 10 minutes—the first a choir of quivering guitars and euphoric keys, the second a no-nonsense slab of backboned rock, liberally embroidered by squiggly effects. Both are devastating, and together they signify what an immensely capable band could do for Malaysian indie if it stays together for the long haul. But if The End is truly the band’s closing chapter, then it is a hanging, unsatisfactory one. Citizens of Ice-Cream deserves to pen a few more pages, or at least an epilogue, to fulfil its promise of sending us to bed with tranquil dreams.
CITIZENS OF ICE-CREAM – THE END
(Independent)
Track Listing
- The Last Emperor
- Parks and Funerals
- Those Who Walk in Chaos
- Life is Short
- Leave it to the Ants
- The End