In 1999, when the Knicks were playing the Spurs for the NBA title, the whole Chinese character tattoo thing was still a novelty. During the playoffs of that truncated post-lockout season, the Knicks spindly center-impostor, Marcus Camby finally stepped up as a legit defensive presence in the middle, and was consequently thrust into the media glare. The large tattoos emblazoned on the side of his arm drew scads of attention at the time, and predictably, a truly lamentable fad was launched. Everywhere you turn now (though I'd place the epicenter square in south Miami, Florida), some dumbass kid with one of those too-skinny fubu beards and a wifebeater has some sort of Chinese character inked onto a highly visible part of his anatomy. Now older and wiser, I'm thankful I resisted the urge to get the symbol for "played out" tattooed on my face.

Anyway, there's a point to this. When I first received this Gwei-Lo record, I took one look at the simple cobalt cover with the Chinese lettering and groaned. But as it turns out, the band's moniker is a term used by the Chinese to describe white people and, more generally, foreigners. Some see the phrase as a pejorative label, others don't. But the literal translation is "ghost walker."

The translation takes on a poignant irony when you consider that Gwei-Lo lost an excellent guitar player, and by all accounts an exceptional friend in Al Brooker on June 4th, 2000. It was only one month before the scheduled release of this, their debut CD, during a performance at the annual Strawberry Fair in their hometown of Cambridge, England, that Brooker collapsed and died on stage. He was 24 years old.

There are two expressive strands in Gwei-Lo's music: drums and guitar. The bass does a marvelously low-key job of anchoring the exposition of the other two instruments, while judiciously applied keyboard parts add space to the arrangements and an almost subliminal counterpoint to Brooker's guitar melodies. I prefer calling it space, rather than the more obvious "atmosphere" because the keyboard parts are so understated and tastefully implemented that invoking the word, with all its accrued connotations, sort of misses the mark. Example: I loathe the wanton use of computer graphics in film, but when it's utilized in service to the plot (e.g. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), and not as an end unto itself, it can be mindblowingly good. And the keyboards on Gwei-Lo are the auditory analog to that.

But like I said before, Gwei-Lo's flesh and blood are the guitar and drum playing of Al Brooker and Jez Spencer, respectively. Take everything bad, cheesy, maudlin, trite, hackneyed and cold about the guitar playing in a band like, say, Tristeza, and turn it on its corny head. Unlike that band's guitarwork, Brooker loads on heaps and heaps of delay without it ever taking on that Digitech, bullshit-shimmery quality that lesser players seem to find so enthralling. Again, as with the keyboard parts, nothing is done without a reason and every individual component seems measured with every other piece of the puzzle in mind.

Speaking about Brooker's guitar playing without relating it to Spencer's drumming is fairly useless. Spencer's technique is busy, busy, busy, with "U.R.R." and "Cellsong" being golden examples of his frenetic style. While Brooker plucks a sparse, reverbed melody, Spencer is everywhere, tapping out very marshal-sounding snare rolls and skipping lightly from ride to crash, down to toms, back to ride, and finishing out the measure with another drum-major snare roll. And he doesn't relent. Every song is chock full of this stuff, eschewing tired rock drummer convention for a conversational style that sounds like the percussive expression of a manic episode, straddling the fence between genius bursts of ideation and fried incoherence.

There isn't really much more to say. Gwei-Lo is a bizarre, bittersweet place you might visit while dozing off in class or a waiting room, clocking in at a fleeting 41 minutes. The songs average around the six-minute mark and are excellent through and through. It's actually pretty awful that there won't be anymore of this to look forward to; nevertheless, this album comes as a welcome reminder that life is short and fucked up, and that we ought to try to leave something of worth behind.

-Camilo Arturo Leslie