PAIRS Vinyl Release This Weekend

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What’s more hipster than a two-piece rock band with a white male singer on drums and a cute Asian girl on guitar? Hmmm…let me calculate this on my ironic Casio calculator watch (matches the Urkel glasses). Well, I guess a cute Asian girl on drums/singing and an owl playing bass would trump that.

Enter PAIRS, the duo of outspoken scene stalwart Rhys, an Aussie cunt, and F, a nice girl from Shanghai who can [kind of] play the guitar. Together they make some loud rock music with lots of banging and screaming a la Animal from The Muppets. Refreshingly, they’re better appreciated live. This weekend they join the ranks of I-released-a-vinyl-in-2012 with their double-LP “If This Cockroach Doesn’t Die, I Will,” on Metal Postcard records and produced by my good friends and neighbors The Acid Pony Club.

Perhaps more importantly than their music, PAIRS vis-a-vis Rhys have unquestionably helped build the music scene in SH. Rhys is one of the few Western promoters in China who markets to the local crowd. [Also the only person who came to the Love Bang pool party in jeans]. But really, dude has sweated to build something in our city, e.g. throwing a secret show in a far-away place with no profit-incentive, promoted exclusively in Chinese on Douban and other websites, conducting and posting countless multi-hour interviews with peeps in the scene (inc. yrs truly), putting lots of local bands on all his bills, and adopting weibo earlier than most laowai.

He’s got a militant approach to everything he does, come across as..intense in interviews (but as my friend pointed out, also has the inquisitiveness of a young Charlie Rose), and doesn’t hesitate to talk shit when called for. Opinions of the man may be divisive, but scenes need peeps like this to grow.

So if you’re somewhere in China this weekend, go support, because they’ve probably been supporting harder than you. No DL on this, go buy the album. If you don’t have a record player, holler at Uptown.

 

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