“Sometimes Starlight, Sometimes Moonlight:” On Windmill’s new release “Demo III”

The Taipei-based Indie band Windmill’s new album is called "Demo III (Bing)". It is their third release, following “Demo II (Yi)” (2009) and “Demo I (Jia)” (2008). The recordings come full circle in both matching the raw youthful vigor and promise of the early releases as well as illustrating the band’s growth and maturity. Part of this is embedded in the process of its recording and creation. The first sessions occurred from 2011-2013 and were paused for what turned out to be a six-year hiatus. In 2019, the band reformed with a new sense of purpose, began playing shows, working on new songs, and decided ultimately to return to and finish the recordings.

This long process of patient creativity, growth, and reflection resulted in a singularly unique outcome. In short, “Demo III" is a stunning piece of auteur songwriting and musical performance, an album that is filled with lyrical and musical bravado, emotional soundscapes, spaces, and stories, manifesting powerful iterations of loss, confusion, frustration, hope, joy, wisdom, and celebration.

Sonically, the sound of the “Demo III”, engineered, recorded, and produced by Yuchain Wang at Rooftop studio in Banqiao New Taipei, fits comfortably into the 90s era guitar-driven Indie rock oeuvre. The guitars are largely offset and rewired, the amps stacked and turned past midnight, the pedals are modded in all the right ways, and the reverbs are set somewhere between Nashville Skyline, Zuma, and Dark Side of the Moon.

The sounds on “Demo III” are rich, textured, warm, and authentic, the production is skilled, imaginative, and artful, and propels the performances, where feeling clearly comes first. The album opens with the short track “Ten Seconds,” an atmospheric looped guitar accompanied with double-tracked vocal that steadily rises powerfully then falls gently. This “wave” motif is one that is repeated musically, lyrically, and thematically throughout the
album. Another motif is the simultaneous presence of opposites: Ten seconds is an instant; however, when it captures some powerful understanding, it can feel endless.

“We watch the balloon slowly rise into the sky
In these ten seconds of silence
There’s no need to say anything”

“Song of the Other” is an anthem rocker, a song that seems to take off effortlessly and never cease. The layered guitars and powerful drum and bass seem to mirror the lyrics emotional intensity, self-reflection, and remorse:

“It’s always like this/Always disappointing/ I’m always so careless every time I pass by/Pass by that window” mirroring

“The Last Movie on Wednesday” is another standout track, a short story that introduces its characters with a light acoustic intro:

“A girl walks out of an office building/She looks up at the sky/[Plans her] weekend beer and movies.”

The song than twists through a number of musical changes and modulations, concluding with a vaudeville drumbeat and toy-piano fantasy ending:
“The couple complete a circle before they realize/ Each other’s dreams are perfectly shaped”

“Youth,” one of the Taiwanese language tracks, is perhaps the most direct distillation of the youth theme that animates “Demo III.” The stark production is powerful: The acoustic guitar, e-bow bass feedback, piano, and mout organ set the lyrics poetically for the listener to bear witness to:

“But what is youth?
Like a poem that no one can explain
Watching the sea surge breaking through the breakwater on a hot day

What is youth?

A star that no one cares about in the sky Waiting for the sea sand to fill the heart’s emptiness”

The album closes with the invigorating and upbeat Taiwanese language track “The Sea,” a song that you should keep in your pocket for your next moonlight drive, one that expresses the duality of feeling and experience that much of the best art seems to constantly reminds us of.

“The darkness of the bottom of the sea can be horrifying or intoxicating.

Sometimes starlight, sometimes moonlight in a dream”

Michael Loncar
Tainan, 3/12/2021