A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

The last time I saw Hedge­hog was at D-22, at an epic night of rev­elry in cel­e­bra­tion of expat duo Hot & Cold’s time in Bei­jing and to see them off. They played to a large enough crowd, though they (and Car­sick Cars) were meant to be a “secret act,” and it was a decent show. They even got quirky vio­lin­ist Yan Yulong to play with them. The time before that, I got to see them play a seri­ously secret set at Old What? Bar, which felt like I imag­ine their early days in the scene did: around fifty peo­ple crammed in a room the size of a someone’s liv­ing room, watch­ing an awe­some band play a bunch of songs.

This show was com­pletely dif­fer­ent. By the time I got there (admit­tedly late), Yugong Yis­han was entirely packed. Not quite Huun Huur Tu packed, but jam-packed at least three rows behind the sound stage, and there was no way you were get­ting down­stairs into the mosh. Hedge­hog had only just started (by my cal­cu­la­tions from the set list on the sound desk), and they played every­thing. It was almost a ret­ro­spec­tive, from their xylophone-brightness of their 2007 “Toy & 61 Fes­ti­val” (玩具和61儿童节), through their Blue Day­dream days, and all the way to this year’s Hon­eyed & Killed. It wasn’t a good­bye, of course, but it was very reflec­tive of them, which makes sense con­sid­er­ing the epic year they’ve had, and the year they have ahead of them.

The crowd was, nat­u­rally, com­pletely into it. For 80RMB per ticket, you really got the fans who love them, and it was clear with the amount of crowd surf­ing that went on. If there are going to be crowd surfers at a show, there’s usu­ally only one or two souls brave enough to go through with it, and they usu­ally only attempt it once. This time, there were at least five dif­fer­ent peo­ple crowd surf­ing, with as many as three peo­ple try­ing to be held up at once. It was a lit­tle insane, and of course nobody was sus­tained for very long, but every­one seemed to tol­er­ate it. Still, I felt like some­one should have told them that even the biggest crowds can’t hold more than two, and cer­tainly not the crowd at Yugong Yis­han. Any­way, every­one was hav­ing a great time and it made the band play even more ener­get­i­cally than usual. The bass player — new to Hedge­hog this year but instantly part of the fam­ily — was par­tic­u­larly into it, which was nice to see.

And finally, at the end of my time at the show (places to be, peo­ple to see, you know how it is), the adorable pint-sized drum-smasher Atom played us a song all on her lone­some. She was alone on stage with a key­board and her high-pitched voice, but unfor­tu­nately the song itself fairly unmem­o­rable — apart from her mic falling down a few times.

Over­all it was a great show. Though I was a big fan of their ear­lier work, I’m really dig­ging grown up Hedge­hog, and I can’t wait to hear what they’ve got for us next. Appar­ently there’s a new album in the works, to be released in the spring, and I’m excited to hear what they came back from the US.

If you were around on the blogs in 2009, you might remem­ber Top Floor Cir­cus as being a con­tro­ver­sial band. They wrote a song called Shang­hai Doesn’t Wel­come You in their inim­itable par­o­dy­ing style dur­ing the run-up to the Expo, which promptly got their fol­low­ing shows can­celled, forc­ing them out into neigh­bor­ing Hangzhou for a lit­tle while. The scan­dal blew over, though, and the ironic folk-punk band has had time to regroup and come back stronger than ever. This is the first time I’ve ever seen their name pop up in Bei­jing, and despite the myr­iad amaz­ing things going on last night (oh, the many other gigs I could have been with), I made the com­mit­ment to see them because I knew it would be a once-in-a-Beijing-lifetime event. I was not disappointed.

To start off with, SUBS opened the show in full Hal­loween getup. Kang Mao was dressed as a mummy, which slowly got unrav­eled as she thrashed around the stage in her usual weird danc­ing rou­tine. I know I’ve spo­ken about SUBS before, and men­tioned how beau­ti­fully intense and spec­tac­u­larly per­for­ma­tive Kang Mao is, but it always bears repeat­ing. It’s a true tes­ta­ment to this band that despite the fact I really am not a fan of high-pitched squeal­ing or ear-splitting vol­ume or almost any other part of SUBS’ sound and act, I always really enjoy myself. Of course, I always wear my earplug because seri­ously, I’m not kid­ding about that ear-splitting thing. If you haven’t seen these guys yet, get a good pair of earplugs and catch them next time they perform.

Between the sets, and help­ing to assuage a rest­less crowd, VeryRock.net put on a (twenty minute) video of other musi­cians’ impres­sions of Top Floor Cir­cus — and the music scene in gen­eral. Every­one was there — from exper­i­men­tal folk artist Xiao He to jazz sax­o­phon­ist Li Tieqiao to punk vet­er­ans Misan­dao — and they all had good sto­ries to tell. There were par­tic­u­larly long seg­ments about the lead singer get­ting drunk and get­ting into fights, as well as his habit of tak­ing his pants off… Nev­er­the­less, it was a great video, and really helped to pass the time as the stage hands set up for the main event.

Now I didn’t know this before the show, but Top Floor Cir­cus sings almost exclu­sively in Shang­hainese. So for their pil­grim­age to Bei­jing, they brought along a pro­jec­tor and a charm­ingly DIY slideshow with the lyrics so that every­one could under­stand what was going on. I’ll admit, it was a lit­tle bit of a dis­trac­tion (for every­one, not just my inner lin­guis­tics nerd), but with a large part of Top Floor Cir­cus’ appeal being in their won­der­fully sar­donic and satir­i­cal lyrics, it was impor­tant to get the mes­sage across. They were all great songs, but par­tic­u­larly mem­o­rable were the fol­low­ing: an ode to “hailuo ayi” set to Knock­ing on Heaven’s Door, a KTV-style trib­ute to the Suzhou River, a song about monks accom­pa­nied by pic­tures of our robed friends at McDon­alds, and one of their few songs in Man­darin about the girls at pink-window “hair salons”. But really, the whole show was mem­o­rable, and I hope they make their way back to Bei­jing some­time soon.

And he really did take his pants off.

Let me first say that I have been to packed out shows at Yugong Yis­han before. The Gar was pretty impres­sively packed, as was Con­ve­nience Store’s tenth anniver­sary, and from reports I hear that Re-TROS was tight-fitting too, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this show was the most packed out the venue has ever been. I turned up a lit­tle before the sched­uled start­ing time of 9:30, and there were loads of peo­ple out­side, as there often is with big shows. Still, I didn’t expect to find my friends out­side to have them tell me that there were prob­a­bly already 300 peo­ple inside, and the show hadn’t even started yet. It was insane inside. It’s often the case with shows at Yugong Yis­han that there’s a bot­tle­neck around the stairs, but if you push your way through there’s plenty of room on the dance floor. This time, there was no push­ing through. There was no room any­where. In fact, the only room avail­able was one row in front of and behind the screen near the bar — even the entrance was teem­ing with peo­ple. I didn’t go upstairs, but mostly because it was impos­si­ble to get any­where. It was hot inside, com­pounded by the fact that it was chilly out­side so every­one was wear­ing jack­ets and get­ting overheated.

In short, it was intense.

How­ever, the music was good. Dawang­gang opened the show with their par­tic­u­lar brand of folk, started by emi­nent folk artist Song Yuzhe, incor­po­rat­ing Mon­go­lian group A Jinai and — at least on Mon­day — infused with the sounds of folk vet­eran Laoda. It was an inter­est­ing twist on folk — a lit­tle exper­i­men­tal, a lit­tle artsy, but still very much grounded in the Chi­nese folk tradition.

Then Huun Huur Tu took the stage, and the crowd went nuts. I have to say that they were eas­ily the best throat singers I have seen, and I have actu­ally seen more throat singers than I would have ever con­ceived of before mov­ing to China. How­ever, I will have to admit that for show-going, I will always pre­fer Hang­gai. They’re not entirely dis­sim­i­lar, though they are from two dif­fer­ent coun­tries — they both dress in tra­di­tional Chinese-style silk gar­ments and play inter­est­ing instru­ments along­side their throat singing. But what Hang­gai brings to the stage is a true ele­ment of per­for­mance. Huun Huur Tu sat on stage and gave a fairly flat per­for­mance, while Hang­gai always has an admirable stage pres­ence that shines through and

First up, a dis­claimer. I got a free ticket to this show through a friend. I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have paid the full 260RMB for the expe­ri­ence, but I might have paid the 180RMB pre-sale price. I had never heard of British Sea Power before, and wasn’t par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in them, and I find a 260RMB price tag a lit­tle too much for a band that isn’t going to pack out the place with all the fans they have (and British Sea Power didn’t). Just because a band is for­eign and vis­it­ing for a fes­ti­val (they’re play­ing Ocean Midi this week­end) doesn’t mean they nec­es­sar­ily deserve such a high ticket price, and I think it dis­cour­ages Chi­nese peo­ple who might have been more inclined to check out a for­eign band — espe­cially with the epic Chi­nese opener they had.

Set­ting aside ticket prices, though, I have to say I was most excited to get to see Muma & Third Party again. I first caught a glimpse of Muma at Straw­berry Fes­ti­val 2010, and I was deeply impressed even after hear­ing only three songs. Of course, I fool­ishly never bought his CD, but that will def­i­nitely change now that I have seen them again. As I said more than a year ago, Muma is an intense per­former, and being so close to the stage this time was such a treat. Their music is the best kind of dark rock, heavy and gothic with­out being com­pletely oppres­sive, and I enjoyed it immensely. One thing that did con­fuse me was that there were back­ing vocals and extra instru­ments for which there was no expla­na­tion, and dur­ing the set I thought it was a bit taste­less that he use a back­ing track rather than get a full band, but I was relieved to find out after­wards that there was a guy behind the mix­ing table mak­ing all these sounds hap­pen. I can only assume that his pres­ence on stage with his com­puter would have ruined the aes­thetic of the per­for­mance, and while that’s prob­a­bly true, they could have just stuck him in the cor­ner, not invis­i­ble behind the mix­ing table. Any­way, I thor­oughly enjoyed myself, and his forty minute set was exactly as long as I wanted it to be.

British Sea Power, on the other hand, I didn’t care for very much. Which is strange, because given my taste in music they fit the bill: upbeat indie rock with cutely quirky band mem­bers. How­ever, after about six songs, they started to all sound the same, and it’s music I’ve heard before already. As I said to those I went with, I prob­a­bly ruined it for myself by lis­ten­ing to my favorite cutely quirky upbeat indie rock band before I arrived, but Muma should have cleansed my palate and left it ready for some great indie rock. What­ever the case, British Sea Power didn’t impress me at all. And to make things worse, they played for nearly an hour and a half. When songs start to sound the same after half an hour, you don’t want to have to stand through another hour of it. So instead, I lis­tened to what I wanted to, and then went and had road beers with a like-minded friend.

I’ll admit it, there was a cer­tain part of me that was ner­vous for this gig. The last few times I’ve seen Life Jour­ney, I’ve been under­whelmed. How­ever, the last few times I’ve seen Life Jour­ney have been at large fes­ti­vals. It appears that they — like many bands — are just bet­ter on a smaller scale. Maybe not quite as small as the time they played Bye Bye Disco and the place was jam-packed by the time the show was meant to start, but Yugong Yis­han was def­i­nitely the right fit for them. Plenty of peo­ple turned out, though as usual peo­ple packed them­selves on the stairs and cre­ated a nice pocket of free space at the back of the pit for us to stand and watch like the tall for­eign­ers we are.

There were no open­ing bands for this show, which meant that the stage was set entirely for Life Jour­ney and their con­cept of “Won­der­ful Day”. This was, appar­ently, a jun­gle theme. The stage was adorned with vines and flow­ers, and their match­ing shirts were white with green leaves at the bot­tom. I’m not sure what this has to do with the album, as the theme of the pho­tog­ra­phy there seems to be a desert, with the band form­ing some sort of oasis in the mid­dle of nowhere. I’m not really one for themed shows, so the vines and flow­ers seemed a lit­tle out of place. But the set dec­o­ra­tion really can’t com­pare to the show itself.

As we all know, album launch gigs can be a lit­tle awk­ward some­times, when a band hasn’t had the chance to intro­duce their new stuff to fans, so everyone’s stand­ing around try­ing to get into new music when all they want to do is rock out to their favorite stuff. How­ever, this album has been so long in the mak­ing that I have already heard most of the songs on it, and so had the crowd, which made this a great show. I sus­pect that the bass player was sick (he was absent from a pre-gig video I saw on weibo, and didn’t look exactly healthy dur­ing the show), but that didn’t detract from the enthu­si­asm with which they played this show. They opened with an incred­i­ble round of upbeat songs that had every­one bop­ping around, and knew exactly when to wind the crowd down.

Now, I’ve made known my dis­like of Life Jour­ney bal­lads (hon­estly, I should just walk away when they start play­ing “Marry” instead of stand­ing there talk­ing about how bor­ing it is), and this gig cer­tainly had plenty. There was also a five-minute inter­lude as the boys changed clothes and we watched their new music video — lit­er­ally, Yann walk­ing along a shore­line play­ing a gui­tar — for their new soporific sin­gle. How­ever, once endured, the slow songs were over, and they rounded up the gig with some more upbeat tunes from the album. They feigned the end of the show and then came out for a great encore — a col­lec­tion of some old favorites. They fin­ished the night with the very appropriately-titled “Sum­mer Hol­i­day”, which had every­one singing and dancing.

All in all, it was a great gig, and an even bet­ter album launch. Get out and buy a copy!