Customer Reviews

Look Directly Into the Sun: China Pop 2007

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After hearing a glowing review of this album on NPR I purchased it via download from Amazon. I can definitely recommend it with some major qualifications.

First, beware reviews that overpraise this simply because it is so unique. Unique it is. I mean, who'd a thunk there was any punk scene in China at all? And no question, many of these cuts are good. How good? Hard to say. But I'm pretty sure that critics are disposed to rate this a bit higher than it deserves simply because it is so unique. I give it five stars, but I have to be honest and say I am not sure whether I'm bumping it up a bit because of its sheer originality.

Second, this is not cutting edge music. You know those photos of Havana that shows all those 1950s cars all over the place? Musically this is a good thirty years behind the times. Much of this is punk that would have been at home in 1977. Demerit's "Fight Your Apathy," for instance, sounds as if it arrived via time warp from some 1978 London punk club. If you didn't like late seventies punk, you won't like this album.

If you keep those things in mind and listen to this with moderate expectations, I think you'll get a kick out of it. Some of the songs are very good. Some are very bland. Sometimes the songs remind me a bit of the first time I listened to Shonen Knife. Sometimes the songs sound very Western -- China Dub Soundsystem sings its cut "Pink No. 9 - Determining the Dose" in an English with only the hint of a Chinese accent. Some songs are either in Chinese or English so heavily accented as to be indistinguishable from Chinese. I've listened repeatedly to Hang on the Box's "Shanghai" and I am still not sure. Some of the bands are not great on their instruments; others are very proficient. As listed here, all of the bands have English names performing songs with English titles. But many of these clearly are translations. I'd love to know whether Queen Sea Big Shark really is the name of a band or whether something was mangled in translation. If I had bought the CD instead of downloading perhaps the booklet would have explained these matters (the one thing I loathe about downloading -- perhaps Amazon and iTunes should provide a .pdf of the artwork along with the song downloads). As it is, one can only wonder at

The main thing these songs have going for them is a freshness that is exciting. Who could possibly have imagined that things would have progressed this far from the Cultural Revolution? And even if they are a bit dated, some of the songs are just great, like Honey Gun's flat out rocking "Light" or Joyside's "Dang."

So, I do recommend this, but I will caution potential buyers that they might end up thinking that the album has been overhyped. It is not, for instance, as musically exciting as the original THE INDESTRUCTIBLE BEAT OF SOWETO, the great collection of South African music that inspired Paul Simon's GRACELAND. This album documents American and British punk influence on Chinese music, but will not in turn influence the West.

Wired magazine said this was a great album and they were right. If these bands had been around in the 80's they would have been stars.

This is a really great album. I purchased it after hearing the glowing review for it on NPR Music's All Songs Considered, and I'm really glad I did. I bought this album without really knowing what to expect (other than the sound bites I had heard on All Songs Considered) -- without really knowing what any of the bands would sound like. This ended up OK, because the songs on here really run a wide gamut of the musical spectrum, so I think there's a little something for everyone on this CD (although most fall into what I would classify as Indie). Most of the songs are in English.

I liked some of the songs so much that I've subsequently purchased several albums from artists featured on this CD!

I've seen over half of these bands live and most of these recordings just don't convey how strongly the bands connect with the music and their audiences. None of these bands are manufactured or concept bands, in Beijing every rock band works up from the bottom. They assimilate decades of rock history within a couple of years, and it's all fresh to them. I predict that this is just the beginning, and that most copying you hear will quickly become amazing creativity. This CD will point you towards the future merger of Rock basics with Asian ethnic music, which has millenia more depth than Americana.

Despite sounding like it came straight outta the late 70s, early 80s, none of this sounds derivative. Even though it is obviously influenced heavily by bands from that era, each band has its own fresh sound. This record is a blast. These bands would have fit in perfectly with X, Gang of Four and others.

This is not China Pop, it is a bad try of chinese american bad pop.