A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

One of the first names I learned in the Bei­jing music scene was New Pants — mostly because it made me won­der whether all Chi­nese bands had such odd names, but also because of their impact on the scene in gen­eral. While New Pants started out as a clear rip-off of The Ramones, they grad­u­ally added sythe­siz­ers and disco balls to their bored punk sound, and they came out sound­ing com­pletely unique. And though there was talk that they weren’t going to make it through releas­ing a remix album, they have very clearly shown that that was not the case. They’ve been quiet, and have been sit­ting on their newest album (released at the show, and came free with the more expen­sive tick­ets), but they’re com­ing back to the main­stream stronger than ever.

This show was not just an album launch, though. It was a show that took four months of prepa­ra­tion, a ret­ro­spec­tive that took plan­ning and time to put together, and it showed exactly what New Pants have been about since the begin­ning. From the moment they took the stage in their com­mu­nist leader attire (from the afore­men­tioned remix album Go East), they delved into each of their var­i­ous per­sonas with gusto, includ­ing back­ing videos, cos­tume changes, and spe­cial guests. The list of high­lights is long, but where else are you going to see a man hump a skele­ton in a wed­ding dress across the stage, or sing a song while clad only in a towel, or a long-haired rocker ride across the stage in a scooter? Only at a New Pants show.

Love them or hate them, New Pants offers some­thing that nobody else does. Their curi­ous electronica-fused punk rock is maybe not accom­pa­nied by the most biaozhun of singing voices, but like every good punk group, their lyrics and pas­sion more than make up for it. The whole crowd sang along with their most loved tracks — I Love You (我爱你) and I’m Ok were unsur­pris­ing par­tic­u­lar crowd-pleasers, and I even saw some for­eign­ers call­ing out for Bye Bye Disco. I’ve seen New Pants per­form at fes­ti­vals before, but with a crowd totally ded­i­cated to enjoy­ing their music, it was easy to see how many peo­ple really do love them.

Because this was an expen­sive show (180RMB was the cheap­est ticket, 580RMB the prici­est), it guar­an­teed that every­one there was there because they love New Pants. And for those up the front, it was worth the price to be close to the stage. Though the fact that the Bei­jing Exhi­bi­tion Cen­ter is a seated venue didn’t make it the most rock and roll show ever, the secu­rity couldn’t be both­ered keep­ing peo­ple from mov­ing fur­ther down to the front. There was still crowd surf­ing, and sneaky alco­holic bev­er­ages, and the acoustics of the venue made call­ing out to the band much eas­ier than at a fes­ti­val. Every­one had a good time, and though the show felt occa­sion­ally scripted, there were plenty of spon­ta­neous moments to remind every­one that New Pants is a gen­uine rock group.

The only thing that sucked about the evening was get­ting caught in the rain on the way home.

If you’re new to New Pants, check them out on Douban, but if you already love New Pants, but weren’t at the show, hit up this album sign­ing at the indie music store on the south-eastern end of Jiugu­lou Road next Sun­day after­noon at 3:30.

I should say this up front: Con­ve­nience Store has been one of my favorite Chi­nese indie bands for a long time. I did some dig­ging on the sub­ject before I moved to Bei­jing and they were one of two main­land bands that stuck around on my playlists (the other one, unsur­pris­ing to any­one who reads this blog, is Life Jour­ney). I have seen them live twice before this year, once in the sum­mer of 2009 with Super VC, and again in Novem­ber of that year when they announced, tear­fully, at the end of a bril­liant gig, that they would be tak­ing a break. I talked to some peo­ple in the indus­try later on and it seemed as though not only was the announce­ment a sur­prise to every­one but lead singer Gou Shuo, but also that it was less of a 休息 and more of a 分开. So to say that hav­ing a tenth anniver­sary show two years later was unex­pected is a bit of an understatement.

How­ever, all that aside, this was by far one of my favorite gigs ever, and it was — I’ll admit — largely to do with the incred­i­ble cameos they had by all their musi­cian friends. Before the show, they revealed their come­back song — the video for which is embed­ded above. In it, there are cameos by some of the biggest names in Chi­nese indie pop: Peng Tan & his wife Chun Xiao, the duo of New Pants, Life Journey’s Yann, Reflector’s Li Peng, rap­ping done by Kungfu’s Yang Fan, and much more. I remem­ber their last show at Yugong Yis­han being seem­ingly over­run with Peng Tan fan­girls because of his cameo, but this time it was clear that the show belonged to Con­ve­nience Store. They had peo­ple in the crowd from all over the coun­try; one that Guo Shou men­tioned in par­tic­u­lar was a young lady who had come all the way from Macau one day after tak­ing exams.

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As I saw such a stun­ning amount of music over the last week (though not as stun­ning as I could have, admit­tedly), I have decided to split up the reviews for the Max Star Music Fes­ti­val into two parts. Part One cov­ers Mon­day — Fri­day, and Part Two will cover the week­end. There were some hits and some misses on all nights, but over­all it was a good experience.

In gen­eral, I really liked the way the fes­ti­val worked. Every­thing was gen­er­ally well-organized, well-stocked, and easy to nav­i­gate. I over­heard peo­ple com­plain­ing about hav­ing to exit from the side and enter from the front, but per­son­ally I think it was good crowd con­trol. The secu­rity was a lit­tle overzeal­ous at stop­ping peo­ple rock­ing out at times, but in gen­eral they kept the peace and every­one got to party as hard as they wanted. There were great lines of sight to be had, even out­side the main area. I never had to wait long at the bar. The only draw­back I saw was the cob­ble­stones got very annoy­ing to stand on very quickly (or maybe that’s just me with my worn-through flip flops).

But onto the bands!

TUESDAY 17 AUG 2010

WANG WEN
It’s a bit unfor­tu­nate that my first expe­ri­ence was this one. I’d spent the after­noon at work lis­ten­ing to the songs on MySpace, and I had been groov­ing along to it. In fact, the dis­ap­point­ing part of this set wasn’t actu­ally the music. The music was fine. What really sucked was the performer’s atti­tude. Now, it was a Tues­day night and a quiet one no mat­ter where you’re bound to go, but Wang Wen seemed to take it per­son­ally and con­tin­u­ally called for peo­ple to get more into the music. Which is fine, but when it didn’t work, he started insult­ing the crowd, say­ing that we didn’t have rock spir­its and weren’t into it enough. And that’s the sort of thing that’s a buz­zkill no mat­ter how much you can groove along to a band. I’m not going to write Wang Wen off entirely — the music some­times makes up for things like that — but he’s got one seri­ous strike against him in my books.

FRIDAY 20 AUG 2010

I saw much less of this day than I wanted to, owing to a hic­cup at work. How­ever, this was by far my favorite day and I hope I don’t gush too much about the bands I did see.

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Being a gig goer in Bei­jing for Chi­nese New Year has been a bit of a sad affair. For the week lead­ing up to and the week of the new year hol­i­days, there was lit­tle play­ing and noth­ing inspir­ing. The only thing that the hol­i­day has been good for is pre­dic­tions in the expat media of bands to watch in the upcom­ing lunar year — com­plete with “Eye of the Tiger” puns.

The most inter­est­ing of all the expat arti­cles was, how­ever, the one in Time Out, which took the opin­ions of lots of peo­ple in the indus­try — from venue man­agers to record label exec­u­tives to music school founders. Though these opin­ions were, of course, slightly biased towards the label’s artists or the venue’s pro­moted bands, both Pet Con­spir­acy and Nanwu got nods from peo­ple out­side of their inter­ested parties.

Inter­est­ing news also fil­tered through this arti­cle. Jiang Nanyan from 13 Months Records reported that one of my favorite groups, Shan Ren, are get­ting an image revamp this year, while Shen Lihui from Mod­ern Sky con­firmed that top bands New Pants, Queen Sea Big Shark, and Re-TROS are releas­ing new albums “soon”. Shen Lihui also noted electro-pop group Big­ger Bang, also pop­u­lar with the Time Out pun­ters, and I have to say that given Mod­ern Sky’s track record, I will def­i­nitely be keep­ing an eye out for them.

Here are the upcom­ing gigs for these bands:

Big­ger Bang! play­ing with Free The Birds (Ziyo) and Chas­ing Star, March 8 at Yugong Yis­han.
Pet Con­spir­acy play­ing March 26 at Yugong Yis­han.

Shan Ren and Nanwu have no upcom­ing gigs, but we should be hear­ing from them soon if Jiang Nanyan is right.

ETA: You can now read the arti­cle online for your­self here. Check it out! (Thanks, Jennifer!)

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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