This was one of the best gigs I’ve seen in Bei­jing, and I defy the rest of the year to offer me one that will top it. It often hap­pens that my favorite gigs of the year hap­pen in Jan­u­ary. I don’t know why it hap­pens, but the result is that it leaves me feel­ing that there’s noth­ing that could be bet­ter for the next twelve months. Of course, noth­ing will stop me con­tin­u­ing to go to gigs, but this was way up there on my list of favorites.

To begin with, we got there right on time (ie, miss­ing the open­ing act). They were on stage when we arrived, but there’s no way we missed any­thing because I got to hear all of the songs from their EP and Douban pages. The place was packed but not uncom­fort­ably so, and the crowd was enthu­si­as­tic with­out being obnox­ious. With that starter infor­ma­tion out of the way — along with not­ing that the sound was good, at least com­pared to the hor­ror story of last week — I can get to list­ing the rather long list of high­lights for a gig with only one artist.

Eas­ily, the biggest high­light was the pro­posal that took place mid-gig. Yes, that’s right, a mar­riage pro­posal. Perdel has a song called “08年我们结婚” (We Got Mar­ried in ’08), and before play­ing it the lead singer was grin­ning at some­one in the crowd and said, “we’ve got some­one here who wants to talk to his girl­friend of ten years… to ask for her hand in mar­riage… just wait a minute, we’ve got some­thing appro­pri­ate to go with it” and started in on the song. Every­one sang along, and after the cho­rus, the guy got on stage and intro­duced his girl­friend to the crowd. She was appro­pri­ately hor­ri­fied, of course, as she got on stage and he showed the ring to the crowd and got on one knee. Of course she said yes, and they hugged and kissed, and it was adorable, and the song con­tin­ued as a sing-along. Fol­lowed by some spir­ited crowd-surfing by the key­boardist. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pro­posal at a gig before, and while I’m not sure it’s for me, it was a great moment.

How­ever, after that, the best moments were tightly packed into the “encore” part of the evening. I have a the­ory about the encore, though, and it’s that they don’t really want to end with their song “再见” (Good­bye), so they just put it near the end and pre­tend they the rest is an encore. They didn’t even go off stage to fake an encore!

Any­way, the next biggest high­light for me was prob­a­bly the solo done by the drum­mer. It wasn’t a par­tic­u­larly amaz­ing song, but it really brought out the stark dif­fer­ences in per­son­al­ity between the dif­fer­ent band mem­bers, and for me those dynam­ics are really impor­tant in a gig. It also reminded every­one why the front man is the front man — even from behind the drums, he shone and gave some­thing to the back­ing vocals. The crowd was really encour­ag­ing, too, which was really nice. Even crowds full of fans can be asses about things like this and talk all the way through, but this crowd was fairly silent and sang along to the ‘woo-wooah’s at the end.

Other than that, I really liked their cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You”. Some­times when Chi­nese bands cover Eng­lish songs, the lyrics get man­gled and it’s almost unrec­og­niz­able; the lead singer car­ried this off per­fectly. It helps, of course, that he sounds like Chris Mar­tin even in his own songs some­times, but he really put on a show of mim­ic­k­ing his voice and it was really nicely done.

But really, high­lights aside, the show was just really solid. I really enjoyed myself, even though I only knew about six of their songs from buy­ing their EP and loop­ing the tracks on Douban. They’re a great, solid rock band and I can’t rec­om­mend them enough. They’ve got a great energy on stage, an actual per­son­al­ity, and I think they could really go places. Just like the guy from “British Pop” who hosted the lit­tle huodong give away in the mid­dle of the show, who said they should go to Lon­don for the 2014 Olympics and promptly got heck­led by the crowd. Keep your eye on Perdel!