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

Jan
18thIZ ( Mamer) at Temple: If a Steel Mill Could Sing…

Since they came back from their world tour, IZ has been keeping a very low profile. A few things bearing mention was that they got a weibo for the band as opposed to having Mamer be the mouthpiece all the time. They’re also just using the name IZ instead of Mamer & IZ… I like that!

Their show at Temple, on the first week of the year, will probably go down as one of the best ones for 2012 potentially: When they were underwhelming at Jianghu for the CD release, they sounded great at Temple.. no doubt that the cavernous nature of the room provided better acoustics to match their dark, industrial, metallic rumbling sounds.

There was actually quite a turnout for the occasion, most of which were faces i hadn’t seen at Temple before so you could tell that they came specifically for IZ.. An audience that was very much well behaved and in a trance-like state during most of the performance. They barely broke the silence from time to time to clap but otherwise kept the conversation to a minimum. Much like the band one could argue. An interesting change in dynamics was with 努尔太 Nuertai singing a bit more than usual, almost more so than Mamer himself (if we can call his mumbling singing).

I still struggle to describe these guys but I think i might be settling for this sentence coined by my friend Beagleboss: If a steel mill could sing, that’s what it would sound like. It’s growing on me! It’s quite fitting, especially with the dark images they tend to use as a backdrop.

As much as I like to call it Industrial Kazakh Folk, I see the steel mill analogy as more accurate. How else would you describe a band that has two bass players and a drummer? and no, Drum n Bass, however semantically correct, just doesn’t cut it.

Either way, this band is amazing and there’s a reason why their latest album made it in my TOP 5 Chinese Albums of 2011. It’s that freaking good!