Chapter 360

We slept in a bit, enjoying the warmth of the blankets in our poorly insulated old slummy building and getting awakened just a few times by the drilling outside. Then we got dressed, went to a small imported grocery store to stock up on rare goodies, dropped it in our luggage, and walked a few kilometers to a brunch spot and ate crepes, a savoury one with egg and cheese and ham, and a sweet one with lemon butter. I also had a glass of warm bourbon with apple juice. It was great.

My earbuds stopped working yesterday night, on the ride back from the show. That angered me, but hey, that’s what happens to electronics, they eventually just die. So after the girlfriend and I split (she has to work tomorrow, the poor soul, and I do not), I rode a rent-a-bike to a store we found online called “Headphone King”. It’s located in a shopping plaza just off East Nanjing Road, a pedestrian district of the city I used to wander in often but haven’t been to for a long time. Normally, it’s crawling with touts and annoying peddlers constantly harrassing every white face they see to buy some useless junk and it’s Ground Zero for scams, like the infamous tea house switcharoo and other honeypots. Now, I assume the scumfucks crawled back to whatever shithole they came from, I can’t imagine business is good for them now that the clueless tourists are gone and that nearly every foreigner in the city is an expat who knows about their shit.

I found Headphone King, a small shop on the twelfth floor, and it was like you can imagine, with hundreds and hundreds of models on display, ranging from a handful of dollars to several thousand. I tried out a few, and asked the guy if I can also try the ones with a 15 000 yuan price tag. The sound was incredibly crisp, but not literally 50 times better than the 300 yuan pair I settled on.

Then I had a few hours to kill, and though it was cold, the sun was out and the air was crisp. I walked a few blocks east to the waterfront and gazed at the Pudong skyline, which has got to be the most impressive skyline in the world. At least I can’t think of another one, maybe Hong Kong, or Rio de Janeiro if that counts.

I looked at my phone, and saw a text message from the organisers of the metal show I was heading to, and around which I pretty much centered this little Shanghai escapade. I squinted to decipher the parade of complicated Chinese characters, and saw the words “cancelled” and “refund”. My butthole puckered, but then I read the whole thing and saw that it’s just one band that cancelled its participation after one of its members was flagged as a possible Covid case. The show was otherwise going to happen as planned. Great.

It had been only two hours since we had brunch, but I was starting to feel a bit hungry again. I went to eat roast chicken, bought some cans of microbrews, and headed to the Mao Livehouse, a large concert venue I hadn’t been to yet. I was there half an hour ahead, as the bands were still doing their soundchecks, so I plopped on a beat-up leather couch, drank my IPAs and read some Thailand sexpat trashlit on my phone.

Eight bands were scheduled, the first one being Hematemaesis, a brutal death metal/slam quartet with an overly enthusiastic female bassist. A large number of emerging Chinese bands have a girl in their ranks, and she’s nearly always handling the bass, no idea why. Then it was Execution, in very much of a Bay Area thrash vein, one track reminded one of Testament, and the next was a clone of Megadeth, or maybe even a cover of Megadeth, I wouldn’t know. I do know they closed with a cover of Exodus’s War is my Shepherd.

Incremate rocked my socks with some more brutal death goodness, followed by the hardcore kids of Gaiwaer. Between sets, I started bantering and bullshitting with other attendees, and it seemed like the Dummy Toys were very eagerly anticipated. The all-female quartet, all dressed in over-the-top punk rags and with insane hairstyles, indeed turned out to be awesome.

Then, for some reason, there was an hour-long intermission. I didn’t want to get my coat out of the storage locker, so I headed out in the night in my thin hoodie and took refuge in a convenience store, where I bought some junk food. The show restarted with Skeletal Augury, a black/thrash metal outfit I’d been looking forward to catch live for the first time, in fact, all the bands on the bill are new to me, which is why I was looking forward to this show. They were evil and uncompromising but lacked the energy of the more punky bands on the bill, like Demerit, who came next and truly stole the show, starting enormous mosh pits. I’d been listening to their album in the past months and I recognized the insanely catchy tunes, like

Holokastrial was scheduled to close the show, but I’d seen them barely 24 hours prior and they were not that great anyway. I had my fix, so I just rode home in the bitter cold and read in bed, sipping a wheat beer.