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Holy holiday hangover! I don't know about you but my head is still ringing. No rest for weary ears, though: San Francisco trio Deafheaven are on their way to give Beijing a thorough pummeling. I guess you'd call it melodic shoegaze metal? That's what the pundits are saying, anyway. Heavy, screamed vocals, and the kind of plodding intensity you hear in certain strains of black metal. The BM vibe is more prominent in their 2010 demos, which were remastered a few years ago but still retain a sense of urgency occupying a battlezone of conflicting / converging influences:
Deafheaven followed up in 2011 with a four-song LP called Roads To Judah. From the start there's a clear stylistic shift. The blast beats and snarling vox are still there, but folded into slow-moving post-rock dirges. The drummer's monotonous bursts create the sort of rhythm-induced hypnosis familiar to anyone who's scratched the surface of one-mic-in-a-frozen-garage-style Scando black metal and its post-modern pastiching acolytes. Assuming you're not one of those people: the phenomenological experience and aesthetic composition of black metal are actually topics of some discourse among bands climbing the contemporary American music festival circuit ladder. If you have the stomach for absurd / extreme pretension, you can read Liturgy frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's thesis on the subject here.
Deafheaven's breakout was last year's Sunbather. This is where they got aboard the Pitchfork hype train. Here's the gist of the current band narrative: "With Sunbather, Deafheaven have made one of the biggest albums of the year, one that impresses you with its scale... it has the ability to capture the attention of people who don't normally listen to heavy music. It's also one of the most successful examples of a band using black metal as a starting point and ending up somewhere else entirely."
Sunbather is definitely more polished, abrasive edges buffed. The guitars overtake the vocals in most parts. The blast beats are still there but less repetitive. It's a relenting listen in context. I assume Deafheaven's set in Beijing will mostly come from this record... I could still see it being pretty heavy live, though.
See for yourself on Friday at Yugong. Think you can still cop pre-sale tickets here. As an added bonus, local stoners Never Before will sludge & trudge their way through an opening set. I saw them play with Niura last month and was pretty impressed. Here they are covering Sabbath:
Catch Deafheaven and Never Before on Friday, May 9 at Yugong Yishan
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Hong Haier, aka L'Enfance Rouge
Another one worth checking out this weekend: the third and final show of the 2014 X Nights Festival. Headliner on that one is Sexy Sushi, who have a whole thing going on. Covered it here a while back. Rounding out the lineup of offbeat electro that night are French/Italian duo L'Enfance Rouge and local dystopic post-punk kosmonauts Snapline. The former is the project of French artist François R. Cambuzat, originally created for theater but adapted to a live music setting, albeit still crammed full of visual stimuli. Here's what that looks like:
And Snapline. They're one of my favorite Chinese bands. Top 5 easy. One of the more idiosyncratic acts on the "indie" scene, Snapline is famous for never pandering: to their audience, to their label, to their peers. They've been relatively quiet since the 2012 release of their last LP, Phenomena, but I saw 'em at Strawberry over the break and can report that they have some brand new rippers to unleash on the world. Here's a recent-ish interview / practice room jam filmed by The Sound Stage:
So that's Sexy Sushi, L'Enfance Rouge (going under the name Hong Haier for their China tour), and Snapline on Saturday, May 10 @ Yugong Yishan.
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Remember to bring earplugs! The heavens may be deaf but I hope not to be until at least age 40... 
