Qururi

It's awesome that a pretty major Japanese band would come to Shanghai to play. It's even cooler that they would be playing for FREE. Tim had mentioned them to me a while ago, but I never really got into them. In preparation, I decided to download some of their stuff. I first downloaded their album Team Rock per Frank's suggestion, however, I was seriously turned off by the amount of UNSK UNSK. Two of the eleven tracks were basically techno while the remainder were not lacking in any synth. Since listening and being incredibly turned off by that album I became to lazy and unmotivated to download more. I was also put off by their collab with Rip Slyme.

What a fool. At the live, there wasn't a single song with synth in it. The music actually was quite good. I would say they are Pillowsy with a bit of Mr. Children and maybe a tiny tiny bit of Tokyo Jihen?(Perhaps it might have just been one song where this was especially true). The vocals were a bit nasal like the Pillows but the way the vocalist sung was very very like MS trying to sing with intermittent cracks and a screaming quality to some of the higher and longer notes.

It was quite funny seeing the vocalist try to MC in between songs, since they knew next to no Chinese. At one point, he tried to relate to the audience by talking about TsingTao, at which point he realized he was not drinking TsingTao. They refused to speak Japanese despite various people including myself shout in Japanese to them. In retrospect, this was probably done out of respect to the rest of the audience.

One thing I'd like to note, is that Mao's sound guy really did a fantastic job tonight. It was amazing. when the drums first came in every note was chest punchingly deep--very defined and not boomy at all. The guitar and bass was balanced well with good definition from each, though I personally would've preferred the bass to be louder for a few songs (I might be just a LITTLE biased though hahah). One complaint I had was about their setlist. It was too short. I got to the livehouse at around 10. By 11 they left the stage. WTF, perhaps I was expecting too much, but I really think an hour is a bit short. They came up for an encore after their show and man, they used the ultimate encore killer: "Just one song, okay?". Though their last song was quite good, the show was too fucking short.

As a final note, 200 RMB for a CD is pretty ridiculous for China. Needless to say, I will be paying a visit to Jpopsuki. I did buy a shirt at an equally ridiculous price since I feel a bit guilty for visiting Jpopsuki.