A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

From the very begin­ning, the stage was set for this to be an awe­some gig, and I was not dis­ap­pointed. Enti­tled Bái (both mean­ing “white” and a play on “bye” as this was billed as their last con­cert of 2009), the gig started out with a white sheet cov­er­ing the stage. The first three songs — the songs off their recently-released EP《潮汐》(“Tide”) — were played entirely from behind a white sheet, with two lights mak­ing lead singer Guo Shuo (郭硕) look like two peo­ple. Even from behind a sheet, they gave a great per­for­mance, but the moment the three songs were over, the show was kicked up a notch.

The sheet dropped and they busted out with a high-energy per­for­mance of their infec­tious 世界 (“World”, off their album “TV Mon­key”) wear­ing white masks which they promptly threw into the audi­ence once the song fin­ished. This got the crowd ready to go, and they played a string of high-energy songs until bring­ing down the mood a lit­tle, play­ing older songs they said they hadn’t played in ages. The mel­low tunes con­tin­ued for a while until Guo Shuo and bassist Du Wei (杜玮) filed off stage, leav­ing drum­mer De Heng (德恒) to back up gui­tarist Lang Lei (郎磊) in an acoustic solo song.

Then, it was time for the spe­cial guests. There were meant to be three, and there was no expla­na­tion as to why Yann (孔阳, of The Life Journey/旅行团) wasn’t there as billed, but the crowd seemed happy with Peng Lei (彭磊, of New Pants/新裤子) and Peng Tan (彭坦). In fact, if the Douban forums are any­thing to go by, there were some hard­core Peng Tan fan­girls at the gig who went pretty much only for his appear­ance. Which, well, I can’t blame them — I’ve done it before — but it felt a lit­tle bit strange to have throngs of scream­ing girls fill­ing the room get­ting excited only once the heart­throb took the stage. In any case, the guest appear­ances were great. Peng Lei played a very sim­ple ditty that even my rudi­men­tary Chi­nese skills could fol­low (New Pants’ “I Love You/我爱你”), and Peng Tan played one of his own songs (which I didn’t rec­og­nize, sadly). Then Guo Shuo returned to the stage and the three of them played a song called 未来 (The Future), which was appar­ently a song that they used to sing together often back when they first met.

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