On their fourth album, <i>The Dreamers</i>—whose Chinese name is the rather more indecent “We’re just like those damn fools”—indie-rock band Accusefive consider questions of maturity, direction and destiny. And to match the scope of those big ideas, the trio hit the road themselves, leaving Taiwan to record at London’s famed Abbey Road Studios. There, Tsai Hsin-lun (vocals), Pan Yun-an (vocals/guitar) and Richard Lin (drums) opted to break with their usual practice of treating recording and mixing as separate stages and capture as complete a sound as possible in the studio—while aiming to retain the core soul of their original demos. The result is a set of ambitious yet vulnerable tracks fuelled by the experience of the journey, from fruitful collaborations to the studio’s collection of historic equipment.
Below, the members of Accusefive share with Apple Music how they rose to the challenge of realising the record they had in mind.
<b>How did recording in London and self-producing affect your creative process?</b>
Tsai Hsin-lun: “We saw different results. Cultural differences aside, different settings have their own rules. We weren’t in Asia; we were in an unfamiliar environment. Self-producing this album and integrating a place that wasn’t ours was a way for us to try something new. This will remain in our memories as a special chapter in our lives.”
Lin: “I feel like it’s an important nutrient. Accusefive tries new things each and every year, so it’s a new experience not just for the three of us but for the entire team.”
<b>What’s your process for achieving the Accusefive sound?</b>
Tsai: “The best way to describe Accusative’s sound quality is ‘direct’. We like using a direct approach and directly expressing emotions in our demos, but our choice of words, arrangements and harmonies bring out different feelings. Working from these demos, we chose to use a subtractive process for our songs. This gives them all a broad sense of direction, but we’re actually very particular when we perform them to make sure all the emotional ingredients are under control. So the album is both direct and exacting.”
Richard Lin: “Subtractive thinking means having a definite picture of the timbre in your mind. You need that picture to be very clear before you record. The thing that’s hard is how to express it. Everyone’s subtractive process is different, so we’re always trying out different things and talking about adjusting the details to mould the shape of the sound so that it goes in the direction we want.
“We worked with Shojiro Watanabe as recording and mixing engineer, so our process this time was to decide on the direction of the sound first, before doing any recording. It was challenging for us because we hadn’t done anything like it before.”
<b>How would you characterise the album as a whole?</b>
Pan Yun-an: “Our fourth album is a summation of my personal experiences and my outlook on life. It has a little of the feeling of a tearful recollection. So many things have happened along the way—I thought for ages about whether I ought to write them into song. Of course, ultimately I did decide to—and to head forward along our chosen path.
“To us, listening to an album involves lots and lots of layers—like waves in the ocean or the elevations while climbing a mountain—each with a different aesthetic. The layers we’ve chosen this time are more like waves.”
“The opening three songs are on the heavier side. But by ‘Beyond The Sea’, it’s like turning a page to a different scene to plunge straight into the ocean depths, where you find ’Threads Of Me’. Then it’s an upward road through ‘Forget For Get’, ‘Happy Bomb!!’, ‘Broken Wings’, ‘True Colors - Dreamers’ and ‘You & Me’ to the high point of ‘Run, Run, Run!’. I love this track order, which make the album sound like wave upon wave.”
Below, Accusefive share insights into selected album tracks
<b>“Run, Run, Run!”</b>
Pan: “This is an especially important song for us and one that made us teary in the studio. It’s a song that breaks your heart every time. It sums up myself and my life since becoming part of Accusefive. I’m eager to share this feeling—and I hope this song can be there for any fan that needs it.”
<b>“Turn Wrong To Right”</b>
Pan: “This song describes a fateful choice. My favourite lyrics are 'You and I had hardships in the past/But after all those ordeals we no longer beat ourselves up/Let wrongs be wrongs and love be love/Make the best of it and face the future no matter what comes.’ For me, that passage is an explanation of the entire album. We can choose to remember the happy things and forget the painful ones, to find ways to change and reflect instead of wallowing in pain. It’s a way to cheer myself up, and to say to my past self, ‘Hey, let’s try to make the loneliness go away.’”
<b>“Happy Bomb!!”</b>
Pan: “We had a great time working with Masa and Stone of Mayday. This one echoes the other tracks in saying that moments of happiness shouldn’t be forgotten—they ought to be remembered. I wrote this song with my older brother Pan Yanshan, who’s a lively and fascinating writer. He did the verses and I did the chorus.”
<b>“Threads Of Me”</b>
Pan: “This song was revised more than any other on the album. We held lots of meetings and even got into arguments while discussing the arrangement—all because it’s an important song. We were trying to decide what style to use to interpret it and what part it should play on the album. We ultimately found it a place as the album’s lightest yet most serious song. On first hearing, it’s a song of reconciliation, a feeling of a wound that’s healed. But that’s not actually the case. The song asks the question, ‘What should we do with a wound that will never heal?’ Whether the wound gets gradually better or worse is all up to the choices we make.”
<b>“You & Me”</b>
Tsai: “This song is a pure expression of emotion. One line in it, ‘My memories make mischief by bringing you before me, at every point measuring my misunderstanding of you,” tells of two people who get together despite knowing they’re incompatible. They think that proximity might be enough to wear away each other’s spikes and let them coexist comfortably. But the spikes grow back—they’re a natural part of them. Is it a good thing to be forever trying to change the purest form of our other half? Maybe we shouldn’t have been together in the first place. We did, though—and it’s a beautiful, painful process. For me, this song is incredibly meaningful.”
<b>“Broken Wings”</b>
Lin: “Pan used a Leslie speaker for the guitar on this one—we never used one before. It has an effect that makes the sound seem to sway in the air, so listening to it feels a little unreal. We found some wonderful surprises from the old equipment we came across while recording at Abbey Road Studios that further spurred our drive to make better music.
“The percussion setup on this track is simple, a pairing of new drums and old ones. The old cymbals were pretty tarnished with a unique sound compared to newer cymbals. Recording that setup was a wonderful thing.”
