As I saw such a stun­ning amount of music over the last week (though not as stun­ning as I could have, admit­tedly), I have decided to split up the reviews for the Max Star Music Fes­ti­val into two parts. Part One cov­ers Mon­day — Fri­day, and Part Two will cover the week­end. There were some hits and some misses on all nights, but over­all it was a good experience.

In gen­eral, I really liked the way the fes­ti­val worked. Every­thing was gen­er­ally well-organized, well-stocked, and easy to nav­i­gate. I over­heard peo­ple com­plain­ing about hav­ing to exit from the side and enter from the front, but per­son­ally I think it was good crowd con­trol. The secu­rity was a lit­tle overzeal­ous at stop­ping peo­ple rock­ing out at times, but in gen­eral they kept the peace and every­one got to party as hard as they wanted. There were great lines of sight to be had, even out­side the main area. I never had to wait long at the bar. The only draw­back I saw was the cob­ble­stones got very annoy­ing to stand on very quickly (or maybe that’s just me with my worn-through flip flops).

But onto the bands!

TUESDAY 17 AUG 2010

WANG WEN
It’s a bit unfor­tu­nate that my first expe­ri­ence was this one. I’d spent the after­noon at work lis­ten­ing to the songs on MySpace, and I had been groov­ing along to it. In fact, the dis­ap­point­ing part of this set wasn’t actu­ally the music. The music was fine. What really sucked was the performer’s atti­tude. Now, it was a Tues­day night and a quiet one no mat­ter where you’re bound to go, but Wang Wen seemed to take it per­son­ally and con­tin­u­ally called for peo­ple to get more into the music. Which is fine, but when it didn’t work, he started insult­ing the crowd, say­ing that we didn’t have rock spir­its and weren’t into it enough. And that’s the sort of thing that’s a buz­zkill no mat­ter how much you can groove along to a band. I’m not going to write Wang Wen off entirely — the music some­times makes up for things like that — but he’s got one seri­ous strike against him in my books.

FRIDAY 20 AUG 2010

I saw much less of this day than I wanted to, owing to a hic­cup at work. How­ever, this was by far my favorite day and I hope I don’t gush too much about the bands I did see.

SUBS
This was my first time ever see­ing SUBS, but as some of you might know they are one of the most talked-about bands in Bei­jing. I had heard that they were a polit­i­cal band, one that could rile up a crowd and very well start riots if they wanted to. I’d lis­tened to their songs before, and liked most of what I heard, but not being a native speaker it is dif­fi­cult to glean exactly what they were singing about.

I didn’t actu­ally under­stand any more of the songs when I saw them at Max Star, but the videos they played on the large screen behind them made it abun­dantly clear. They played videos of protests from all over the West­ern world, with a lot of police vs. pro­tester vio­lence, and that was enough to get the mes­sage across.

As for the music, I liked a lot of the songs — and one lyric I was able to catch was “silence has a voice”, or some­thing along those lines — but there were times that it wasn’t my cup of tea. Occa­sion­ally it got a bit too loud and screamy, and while I know that that’s what punk is all about, it got me to tune out a few times. Every­one else, on the other hand, was totally into it: there was the oblig­a­tory crowd-surfing and mosh­ing, an unex­pected bout of veg­etable throw­ing, and an adorable child totally get­ting into the music, bounc­ing on his father’s shoulders.

PET CONSPIRACY
Another highly-talked about band that I have never seen before, who also had the honor of com­pletely blow­ing me away. The per­for­mance started with a dra­matic open­ing, the band dressed in black skin-tight out­fits that opened to have bat wings, as a video of the 1931 Franken­stein played on the screen behind them. It was a very impres­sive intro­duc­tion to the band, and set me up for quite a per­for­mance. They didn’t disappoint.

Dur­ing the show, the crowd went off, and so did Helen Feng. Entirely recov­ered from her leg injury in May, she bounded around the stage in high spir­its, and at one point emerged to begin a song from inside the mosh pit. This is what hap­pens when you take your eyes off Helen for one sec­ond — she turns up in a throng of fans. Hon­estly, I’m sur­prised she doesn’t have more bro­ken limbs. But boy does she put on an amaz­ing show. Her duet with the drum­mer was also a par­tic­u­lar high­light for me. So it wasn’t Helen Feng per­form­ing on Fri­day. How­ever, her stand in, Yun­yun, clearly kept up the band’s rep­u­ta­tion. Hope­fully I’ll get to see Helen in action soon. Cheers to Bei­jing Daze for alert­ing me to the mistake.

Con­tin­u­ing with the polit­i­cal themes that SUBS started, in addi­tion to old movies and other videos, Pet Con­spir­acy also played some video of the G20 Lon­don riots. I wish I could remem­ber the song they hooked it up with, but it was inter­est­ing that two dif­fer­ent bands man­aged to play protest/riot footage on a stage built on a place where emper­ors would offer sac­ri­fices to gods of the sum­mer solstice.

NEW PANTS
The last time I saw New Pants, they were play­ing a lot of remixed, rein­ter­preted ver­sions of their pre­vi­ous songs. Which would have been great, had I ever heard New Pants play before. This time, though, not only had I been keep­ing myself on a steady diet of New Pants mate­r­ial for a while, but they also played their older songs in their orig­i­nal for­mat. Which made for a great set, at least for me to lis­ten to.

One song in par­tic­u­lar that I remem­ber ril­ing up the crowd was a boppy elec­tronic track off their 2006 album《龙虎人丹》 (Dragon Tiger Panacea), 你就是我的明星 (You Are My Star). It’s a great track and had every­one and their kids danc­ing around in time.

And then, as was cus­tom­ary at Max Star Music Fes­ti­val, the crowd com­pletely dis­si­pated after the last act. There must have been a park reg­u­la­tion on how long the fes­ti­val could go on for, and every­one was com­pletely respect­ful of it. It did mean that the fes­ti­val couldn’t run over time, and that some acts got cut short, but… more on that in Part Two.