Great Ningxia Night, Superb Summer Group
There was a whole lotta music this past week as i mentioned before with some pretty darn mesmerizing stuff starting with Super Ningxia Night at 2 Kolegas. For this October holiday edition, the gang pulled out all the stops and brought over a banging lineup with 7 bands: Nucleus, Zhao “lao da” yiran, Summer Group, Lidong, Buyi, Skarving and WHAI… how about that to get your socks off?
Unfortunately, I missed Nucleus and Lao Da due to other commitments but got there for everyone else. The place was not packed and that made things quite a bit nicer: A good crowd but not elbows to elbows… The bands did their usual performances with all the good and bad that comes with it… I’m not really gonna review all of them but a few things did standout:
Lidong: Good friends Lidong, with a new album almost ready, were missing the talented Wu Kejia on guitar so the songs sounded a bit different. The ever amicable Tofu tried making up for that absence replacing Wu’s guitar parts with interesting visual antics on stage. I really did the fact that Marie-Claude ( Mademoiselle) has rejoined the band. The accordion adds a lovely dimension to those songs.
WHAI: So this is the unnamed project i referred to a few months ago with Liu Miao (2 Kolegas, Lidong), Zhang Wei(buyi / Longshendao) and Chen Zhong. The lineup might be new but the band has actually been around for a while with Ubuli on skins. I never caught the old lineup but the new one is building something potentially interesting with Keyboard, bass, synth, guzheng and guitar. They’re delving into interesting progressive rock. Last tuesday, they did have a bit of a pop edge that i didn’t care for much.
Summer Band (xiayuetuan 夏乐团): I’ve seen them play a few times this year and it was always ok… tuesday, they were on freaking fire! Singer Hui Zi is one of the most charismatic singers on the scene at the moment, reminding me of Voodoo Kungfu’s Linan. The rest of the musicians measure up nicely too, especially the bass player. It’s nice heavy melodic hard rock with good progressions and a lot of freaking feelings pouring into the performance. Catch them if u can sometime soon and go listen to their stuff on douban: http://site.douban.com/xiayuetuan/
Buyi put on a solid performance as you would expect from one of Beijing’s hardest working bands and Skarving did what skarving does best: bring on the good times!
Overall, a beautiful night over by drive in with an unusual amount of drunken stupidity but still fun…
looking forward to next time. In the meantime, I’m gonna try to catch Lao Da with Li Dong saturday at Jianghu.
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After the chaos of Friday night, this was 2 Kolegas returning to what it should be! They even dressed the place up for it, fairy lights and hanging beer bottles outside, saozimian and Xixia beer back on the menu, yum!
Lidong without WuKejia is just not the same, but I’m really liking WHAI after seeing them 3 times now. I think Laoda was, again as he always is, the highlight for me. Long live Ningxia nights at the drive-in!