from Beijing Gig Guide

There’s always some­thing dif­fer­ent about going to see a for­eign act in Bei­jing. It’s not just that the crowd is filled with for­eign­ers, or that the music is some­how more famil­iar than any­thing you hear from a good Chi­nese band, but there’s always some­thing else, some­thing that makes the night mem­o­rable. Some­times, it’s some­thing as sim­ple as Yugong Yishan’s power cut­ting out in the mid­dle of Andrew Bird’s set, but some­times you have per­form­ers like Die! Die! Die! that leave you speak­ing about it for days afterwards.

I hadn’t heard of Die! Die! Die!‘s per­for­mance style before I got to the gig, where a friend of mine told me that they went absolutely nuts on stage, and brought their act off stage and into the crowd. We’ve all seen that before — crowd­surf­ing while play­ing a gui­tar or singing — but this is some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent. There wasn’t a part of D-22 within mic cord range that wasn’t climbed and per­formed on, and most likely bro­ken. The lead singer — while off-stage, just an unas­sum­ing blonde guy with Buddy Holly glasses — climbed up the amps to the sec­ond floor of the venue, break­ing the smok­ing angel on the way down, per­formed count­less times in amongst the mosh pit, mosh­ing along with his gui­tar, he climbed up onto the bar and broke some of the fairy lights and smashed his face into the Matt Nei­der­hauser por­trait of Our­self Beside Me. He lay on the ground in spilt beer and cig­a­rette ash and got up for hugs and more mosh­ing. It was, in a word, insane. And I loved every moment of it.

The music prob­a­bly wasn’t really my style — noisy and deranged and anger-inducing — but the per­for­mance mixed with the unpre­dictabil­ity of the crowd made for a hell of a show. One thing I will say about the crowd is that they enjoyed them­selves. A bunch of for­eign guys started mosh­ing right at the begin­ning and didn’t stop. And this isn’t a bunch of skinny 60kg Chi­nese boys throw­ing them­selves at each other, these are six-foot 90kg New Zealan­ders push­ing and shov­ing and falling to the floor. It was all in good fun, as any mosh pit is, but you could see the tiny Chi­nese spec­ta­tors around them look­ing pretty scared. A few brave souls joined in, but if it weren’t for the smiles on everyone’s faces, I would have been more scared of get­ting trampled.

After the high­light of insane lead singers and fevered mosh­ers, it’s hard to remem­ber the Chi­nese acts of the night. The B-Side Lovers have given up resem­bling Hedge­hog and put on an electronic-infused acoustic set that nearly bored me to tears with­out Atom beat­ing the shit out of her drums. Bird­strik­ing were okay, but the singing (or lack thereof) really brings down the feel of the songs. They prob­a­bly had the most energy of the night, though, as Wan­der­lust really just felt like two kids on synths play­ing in their dorm room — which is prob­a­bly what they are.

Check out a video of Die! Die! Die!‘s last song of the night below the cut or here on Youku.