When I first read about this gig, all I knew was that the lineup was Car­sick Cars and Mr. Grace­less, which excited me enough to decide to com­mit to going to it more than a month before it hap­pened. Then PK14 was added to the lineup and it resolved my deci­sion. It was an expen­sive gig, I’ll give you that, and hon­estly I’m not sure it would have been worth the full 100RMB, but the pre-sale price was just right. And of course, as with almost any review of gigs at Yugong Yis­han, there were ridicu­lous and annoy­ing sound issues through­out the show, but I’m not sure that’s ever going to change. Peo­ple will always show up for a gig at Yugong Yis­han, because their line­ups are always fantastic.

Venue rants aside, I really enjoyed the show. Mr Grace­less seemed a lit­tle more ner­vous than I’d ever seen them before, but they still played a solid set. They reminded me a lot of Nir­vana, until they opened their mouths at which point they sounded a lit­tle like Super­grass. Basi­cally, they sounded like an unpol­ished cam­pus rock group who have got­ten really far, which is exactly what they are. They’re going places, that’s for sure, but they’ve got a lot of time before they are any­where near the cal­iber of the other two bands that took the stage that night.

Car­sick Cars were up next, the sec­ond offi­cial time per­form­ing with their new lineup and the first time I’ve seen them thus. The new addi­tions were solid, and they man­aged to mostly keep up with Zhang Shouwang. Unfor­tu­nately, there were a cou­ple of times when it was clear that they need to put in a few more prac­tice hours before they can be the same band Car­sick Cars was before the mem­ber change. And with the exper­i­men­tal and jam style that they have, those out of sync moments were pretty glar­ing. Still, they had a great show and will def­i­nitely con­tinue to do so as long as they keep prac­tic­ing. The only thing I will men­tion is that they didn’t play Zhong Nan Hai, which was an inter­est­ing choice. They opened with You Can Lis­ten You Can Talk, and they sang He Sheng, but they left out their first big hit. I’m not sure what the rea­son behind it was, but hope­fully they don’t refuse to play it just because it was their most pop­u­lar song; that always ends badly.

And even though it was dif­fi­cult to stick around for another act as it neared mid­night, but I insisted because this was the first time I had ever seen PK14. I hadn’t lis­tened to much of their recorded stuff, but I really enjoyed their per­for­mance. What I said to myself if not my fel­low gig-goers at the time was that there’s def­i­nitely some­thing to be said for a proper front man. Mr Grace­less is yet too young for any of them to have devel­oped that dynamic stage pres­ence, and while Zhang Shouwang seems fond of throw­ing him­self around stage, I wouldn’t say he inter­acts with the audi­ence very much. Yang Haisong, on the other hand, is the real deal, and PK14’s expe­ri­ence shows in what an amaz­ing show they put on. I think the most impres­sive part of their per­for­mance, how­ever, is that they man­age to sound raw and rough while at the same time being a tight, cohe­sive act. I enjoyed them thor­oughly, far more so live than recorded.

Maybe Mars put on an amaz­ing show that night, and their desire to show off three gen­er­a­tions of their bands was def­i­nitely ful­filled. Each band showed a clear step in not only Maybe Mars’ time­line, but also in the Bei­jing scene’s. It was inter­est­ing to see them all lined up like that, and I hope that all three bands keep going for long enough that a fourth gen­er­a­tion joins them.