BeijingDazeTales of Live Music From Beijing's Mostly Underground Rock Scene..

Apr
2ndSound of the Xity: Chengdu’s Sound Toy at Yugong Yishan

With all the shows lined up for the Qing Ming Holiday (most of which are under the Sound of the Xity 影响城市之声 banner) it would be quite easy to overlook a show because I’m not familiar with the band’s name. Luckily for me a friend happened to give me a heads up about Sound Toy 声音与玩具, a band he described as sounding ‘a little like older Zhaoze albums…” That was enough to peak my interest to check them out, after all Zhaoze (though mainly their most recent 2 albums) are one of my favourite Chinese bands. Sound Toy, based in Chengdu, have been on the scene since around 2001. They’ve been through various line up and instrument changes over the years fluctuating between 3 to 5 members. They released their one and only album in 2003 and from what I can tell this was their first show in Beijing since Strawberry 2009. I got to Yugong right on the scheduled start time of 9pm and edged my way through the surprisingly full venue to get as close to the front as possible. Just as I was getting up to the stage singer Qu Bo walked on to cheers from the crowd and started strumming his guitar, being joined mid-song by his bandmates. Their music is hard to classify, it’s been called britpop, which it’s really not. It ranges from post rock tracks like 不朽 to more prog rock on 奇迹 and a little pop on 伟大说谎者. There’s also a lot [...]