Saturday night at Yuyintang and a Beijing based Maybe Mars band was in town for a CD release. Usually a big event. They were Guai Li. The full line up:
Good turn out but a kind of weird mixed crowd of punters. Duck Fight Goose opened up. They had moved the stage around a bit to incorporate extra synth equipment. They started with a synth oriented track and it seemed to take the edge off their usually punchy set. They are always good, mind you. Ghost is Online was the usual standout track.
Guali's CD is rather good and singer Wen Jun was on tonight. For a mixed crowd and being far away in Shanghai though, most people were not familiar enough with the material to start getting down. There was a long period of time where there were no tracks on Douban at all. Also, the sound wasn't clear enough to let new listeners hook into the songs. Finally, it was a decent night.
I have to make a special mention of one negative aspect though, because it's been like this for years and i'm surprised it still goes on. This was essentially a CD release tour, and they didn't bring their own CDs. There was a selection of Maybe Mars CDs on a table, but they had to run out after midnight to find their own CDs and bring them back. I had given up and then ran into the bassist outside as he was bringing them over. Luck.
The CD is great.
no mention of the ugly broken glass incident? i hope the girl is ok :-(
I have to say I was underwhelmed. This is about the 5th time I have seen Guali and this felt forced. Some really nice ideas in there, but let down by muddy sound and, I think, a lack of cohesiveness from Wen Jun. I just didn't really feel like she was completely with us last night.
Oh, and the glass incident. I only heard what happened second hand but it sounded really gnarly...
The glass thing, yeah, I have no idea about the original incident, I just saw the guys dancing about, like you would at a rock show ... then I saw a ruckus. Then later someone told me a girl got glass smashed in her face.
Was she bumped into while holding a glass in the pit area ... or was she glassed during a ruckus? Anyone know?
I hope she's OK.
Yuyintang has been incident free for such a long time. It's a shame when stuff like this happens.
You forgot the night a month or two back when the guy from Joyside and his mates kicked the shit out of someone.
oh and about the show: duck fight goose rawked. ive now seen them 4 or 5 times and each time they blew me away. those new synth songs were a bit more accessible & i really enjoyed them. way to go! guaili were indeed meh, although they shouldnt be blamed for the bad sound. but especially the white rabbit & the model covers were rather uninspired.
So, I have info on the glass incident, it was the guys bouncing about who were holding the glass, as they moshed, and the girl was just standing there. C**ts.