ChunQiu & Bad Mamasan @ Yugong Yishan: Double Blast of Metal, headbanging galore and stiff neck follows

Hair did fly, heads banged, and the Cloven-Hooved Prince of Darkness had his due on Friday night at Yugong Yishan with Bad Mamasan and ChunQiu bringing their respective brands of sonic goodness!

A scheduled dinner with some friends dragged a bit longer than expected and rain made it even more difficult to get there by the scheduled 10:00 p.m start but we were alright.. Nothing in Beijing seems to ever start on time! it was good to not be rushed, get there, grab a drink and just hangout with the folks that had turned out. Members of Black Cat Bone, Buyi, GAWTMY & Maggie Who amongst others were in attendance along with a good 100 people!

Bad Mamasan eventually made it on at around 11:00 to roaring cheers! They had a nice little intro video prepped with good visuals and dark symbols to get us in the mood right away! This was the 2nd time only for me to see them and i think they improved in terms of playing together and getting the new songs out. Their originals are quite catchy and definitely a throwback to early maiden with generous guitar licks, a pounding bass and soon-to-be thundering drums (we’ll make a Metal drummer out of Toby sooner than later- I’ll get ya some Chris Slade videos :-p ). There was a decent amount of headbanging going on with Bad Mamasan, especially during “God of War” but you shouldl have seen the audience when they launched into old ‘Maiden. Motorhead or even The Beatle’s Helter Skelter!

Bad Mamasan was recording the performance live so i’m hoping to get my hands on that baby soon and give it a listen again…

A little past midnight, it was time for the ChunQiu boys to come on and treat us to a rocking set of Metal with Chinese Characteristics! And they did! I’ve seen the boys a few times over the past few months playing their acoustic sets mostly at Jianghu Jiu Ba and really wanted to hear what they sounded like live and electric because i hadn’t heard them play fully electric since 2006. I loved it!

Yang Meng (vocals) is one of those musical mysteries i love: he looks like a shy artist/painter that just took the wrong turn and ended up in a metal show but make no mistake: He can headbang with the best of them! His voice might not be that of Chris Cornell but he has some serious pipes on and it fits their style of music… The band played for just about an hour going through their catalog and mixing up razor sharp riffs with melodic harmonies.

Talking about Yang Meng again, he had injured his finger earlier and was unable to play guitar which made him noticeably uncomfortable during some of the extended instrumental sections of the songs but he still managed to rock out! One of the highlights of the evening was when Kaiser Kuo took up the microphone and sang a song in honor of Zhang Ju (Tang Dynasty) who passed away years ago from a motorcycle accident.

A few notes:
– I’m gonna start an online petition to get Bad Mamasan to cover “Fear of the Dark“… I can picture Jamie singing that in the creepiest of fashions.
– Diao Lei is one hell of an amazing drummer.. his style works so well for ChunQiu but just completely misses the boat with Honeygun!
– 3 days later, my neck is still stiff from all the headbanging! I’m pretty open minded when it comes to music and listen to just about anything..that said , my true love is of the heavier variety: Pure old school metal or bluesy Hard Rock! When any of those two comes around, the beast is unleashed and there is no rest for the wicked, just headbanging madness!
Mark your calendars for June 18th when ChunQiu celebrates their 10th year anniversary at Mako livehouse with a musical cocktail: 1 unplugged set and 1 fully electric!