Loose Canon

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Nurtured by a growing number of live venues, ever decreasing barriers to recording and a broadening disenchantment with Cantopop — the city's dominant music form to date — Hong Kong's independent-music scene has suddenly become crowded. As you would expect, a great number of the bands that comprise it are vehicles for the subpar songwriting and cack-handed guitar playing of solemn undergraduates, chubby expats and the sort of people that have fabulous haircuts but dreadful day jobs. But a handful of ensembles are worth crossing the street to see. And a very few — perhaps no more than two or three — are indisputably talented. Chochukmo (the name is a joining of the Cantonese words for persist, chase and feather) inhabits that slender percentile.

They are an extremely likable band. Live shows are swaying, drunken, multiracial carousals of mutual infatuation between audience and musicians. Lead singer Jan Curious has a litheness and thinness of girth that would make a Rolling Stone proud. The English-language songs are delirious paeans to fast cars ("Tell Her"), fast girls ("Caroline") and fast times ("Something Special"). And how is it possible to not be won over by a group that declares its chief influence to be "every song we've ever heard"? (See Asia's best bands.)

This brilliance is not quite captured in their debut album, The King Lost His Pink, which was evidently recorded in haste (for some excruciating moments the live favorite "Head to Toe" is actually out of tune) and without the benefit of a seasoned producer. Chochukmo's fan base will cut them slack — such is the band's fey, disheveled charm — but a less breathless follow-up is plainly needed. So while The King Lost His Pink incurs no loss of potential, the hard part has yet to come.

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