Subsonic Eye
Singapore Dreaming
TOPSHELF
It’s not every day that a writer for an American indie-rock website gets to introduce music fans to a band from Singapore. But of course there are musicians living in Singapore—don’t Wormrot and newly signed Kanine artist Blush sound familiar? OK, maybe not. But there’s certainly one righteous music project that deserves your attention at the moment: Subsonic Eye, simply self-described as “guitar music,” is perhaps the most exciting active band from Singapore, and judging by the exceptionally high quality of their new record Singapore Dreaming, they’re worth keeping tabs on. The quintet actually coalesced in 2017, but continue to rise to the occasion with each subsequent album of theirs, ensuring that each is stronger than the last.
The group’s fifth studio effort is perhaps their most intriguing. Whereas musicians have written countless records about communing with nature and coping with urban life, Singapore Dreaming’s preoccupation is with much higher-level questions: Are “work culture” and the more traditional type of “community culture” inherently at odds with each other? Will Singapore eventually reach a crossroads where it’ll have to pick one or the other? Has technology made it so that a work-life balance will never be possible to achieve again? Will human beings ever feel compelled to care for the poor, or have those altruistic attempts vanished for good? How much tighter can federal governments put the onus on working-class families to fix society’s problems?
Subsonic Eye copped their new album title from a 2006 Singaporean drama film of the same name. Like this album, it, too, puts working-class struggles front and center of its story. The jangly Singapore Dreaming LP proselytizes the beauty of the natural world and argues that both office workspaces and urban centers in general foster callousness like a Petri dish allows a fungus to grow. While this all sounds like a bit of a drag, the band ensured their new album wouldn’t succumb to dreariness or hopelessness but rather present their canary-in-a-coal-mine warning with upbeat and pleasant songs that are diametrically opposed to the album’s message. In doing so, they use a teaspoon of sugar to help the medicine go down, so to speak.
It’s a smart strategy implemented by smart musicians who themselves are smarting at the state of the world—yet remain unhindered to provide hope with deliriously catchy indie-rock highly reminiscent of mid-’90s groups like Superchunk and Guided by Voices. Kudos to Subsonic Eye for not only presenting these critical questions and issues to the listener, but reassuring us with positively positive music that reminds us that we don’t have to succumb to despair, hopelessness, and inertia. It’s a sobering reminder that it isn’t just the US that’s currently plagued by what are essentially existential crises.
