The Chinese Stars’ set at Rhinoceropolis on Friday felt surprisingly rote and lame, despite its high level of energy. photo by Molly Booker.
It’s comforting to know that when you’re approaching middle age, you can be as sassy as you wanna be. You can stand there, arms folded, and declare, “I picked ‘musician,’ and that’s the end of it.”
, lit from beneath with naked bulbs, play hyper, fitful disco-punk with as much energy as any 15-year-old. Cobbled together from the remnants of (go ahead and wince at the name) Arab on Radar, they haven’t evolved much. When comparing the two bands, the tense twitchiness is AOR’s calling card. Otherwise, the sound is nearly identical. The vocalist (Eric Paul), for instance, maintains his desperate wailing. As a performer, he prances about in front, arms pulled in like a T. rex’s, abruptly folding in half with the loudest screams. Almost all his phrases go up at the end, as if he were a hysterical valley girl recounting some totally bogus incident. His potbelly protrudes from under his shirt as he twists and bends backward.
It’s pretty groovy, I guess. The audience likes it; everyone’s gleefully hopping and wiggling. I recognize at least half of the songs from their 2004 album “A Rare Sensation,” and a handful from their most recent release — 2007’s “Listen to Your Left Brain.” The guitar zips up and down like a nervous fruit fly on songs like “Panic in the Population” and “Cheap City Halo” as Paul aims the mic at his mouth, a daredevil bachelor aiming an OJ carton. I’m getting tired. I yawn.
The truth is, I should have seen these guys two years ago. It’s my own fault. I’m a fan, but I need something new. The sound has worn on me; it’s frazzled my little ear hairs in the same way for too long. I’m about to let them off with just that when, suddenly, Paul does the old jerking-off-the-microphone trick. I throw up a little in my mouth. Why did he have to go and do that? I was about to launch into a new paragraph, one with a philosophical slant. I was going to get preachy about middle age, and punk rock, and living the dream of a traveling band. I was about to express a warm admiration for this schtick, but there are dealbreakers. Ironically, I might have forgiven him if he really was 15.
The Chinese Stars, as a band, do what you expect. If you’ve heard any of their albums, and you have an ounce of imagination, you can stitch together an idea of what their live show must be like. All of the songs are directly replicated from the studio tracks, and the energy is predictably high. I now wonder, when I see a show like this, whether or not noise rock and its adopted kid sister, dance punk, have reached their plateau, or if I’ve simply reached my limit.
Alex Edgeworth is a Denver writer and regular Reverb contributor.
