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Riding the wave that began with 2006's critically acclaimed eponymous EP, Beijing quartet Lonely China Day go straight for the jugular on their full-length debut Sorrow. Where the EP rested like a leaf in a millpond the album rages like the Black Sea in a hurricane. Songwriter/vocalist Deng Pei fully utilizes his band to construct mechanical bouts of beauty and fury with subject matters ranging from emotional despair to criticism of Chinese political oppression all packaged and beamed to Earth from atop a mountain on the moon. Each track bursts with surreal minimalist lap tops speaking alien languages inside an indie-rock cocoon with Deng Pei cooing then roaring Mandarin poetry until the whole thing blossoms into a single rose upon a snowy dessert landscape.

Sorrow is the result of a band pushing their sound further into the abyss of an abstract ocean. Lonely China Day are out to prove there is legitimate musical art coming out of China with a debut that lulls and dances like a giant robot in a vast poppy field shouting sparks into a bullhorn.

Engaging and challenging, Sorrow is the sound of an ancient society just waking up to the modern world with eyes and ears wide open. Strap on your headphones and prepare for a life changing conversion!

Arrows Made of Desire

Joewi Verhoeven wears his influences lightly for someone just the other side of teendom. Born of Dutch and Chinese parents, brought up in Holland and re-locating to Beijing for Mandarin study and film school, he has managed to find the time to soak up the post-grunge tunefulness of Soundgarden whilst being at home with the pre-blues minstrelsy of Mississippi John Hurt, entering guitar world via a Nirvana portal like so many other early teens he's ended up more between Arthur Lee and Roddy Frame rather than totally sold on the easier world of post-rock noodling abstraction. All to say that Joewi (say "joowi") is more about tunes than most rock musicians these days.

The band called Arrows Made of Desire (a name lifted from a line in Jimi Hendrix's awesome "Voodoo Chile" where he misquotes William Blake's "Jerusalem") has gone through a few incarnations, but the creative pivot has always been Joewi Verhoeven. His debut set for Tag Team Records, "Songs That Sell Fish", was not much more than a collection of loose demos, pre-built fuzzy-fi, near zero production values, almost field recordings, but with enough raw promise to indicate better was to come. Joewi linked with bassist Rutger Brauer (formerly of Jimmyhat) and Xiao Dou, on loan from Beijing's hippest jazz outfit the Red Hand Jazz Band, for the sessions that resulted in Songs That Sell Out; starting in late Spring 2008 and running on and off through the following six months. Recorded at Yuli Chen's Sweet Factory in Beijing, an Aladdin's cave of analogue gear rescued from NYC studios, the song structures on the album were captured fast around the live rhythm section before a more measured building of the feeling for each track. The set moves through instant pop classics such as the brass-punched snarl of "Missing Out" or "Dependency" one of those tunes you've known all your life, a sexy semi-samba in "Race", the pastoral plaint of "Bear it Calmly", the angst-ridden dissonance of "Revelation" and the jazzed-out "Heroes Hit Bottom"; perhaps its no accident that by the time the last track "Denouement" arrives with an unmistakeably contemporary stamp it can be taken as indication of what's to come.

All the songs here are written and arranged by Joewi Verhoeven, engineered by Yuli Chen - pre and post his involvement in the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony; Yuli also played the various keyboards that may be heard tinkling intros and outros. Vintage and also legendary BBC DJ Steve Barker (On the Wire) was brought in for fatherly attention of all the young people involved in this project plus random co-production assistance for Joewi throughout the process and the tracks were mastered into a shiny things by Mr Fred Kervorkian of Avatar Studios NYC, whose mind and fingers have previously manipulated everyone from Sonic Youth to Pharoah Sanders. Enjoy but resist whistling along!

For all her fancy-pants qualifications, Du Yun produces perfectly formed accessible pop music. If forced at gun-point to bandy vague adjectives around, we'd use words like 'electronic', 'soulful', 'sexy', 'jazz-inflected', 'bilingual', 'crisply produced', 'blip-poppy' and 'evocative'. We could go at some length here [go figure!], but frankly the demos we've received so far outstrip our ability to adequately verbalize the emotional response they generate. And that's just the demos!

Born in the shadow of post-Tiananmen nihilism, the collapse of state run industry and a desert that will someday swallow their city whole, Cut Off!, the first E.P. from pioneering Beijing-based post-punks Rebuilding the Rights of Statues delivers explosive, danceable, unsettling energy that leaves you unsure whether you want to take your clothes off and shake the spiders out, or go look for a rope, a closet and a copy of Iggy Pops The Idiot. This is visceral music built from the bones up, think ubermench rather than Frankensteins monster: beautiful, brilliant and brooding.

Hailing from Athens, GA, Venice Is Sinking are the newest addition to Tag Teams ever more cosmopolitan roster. The five-piece specializes in lush, anthemic orchestral pop with occasional dalliances into both the Americana and experimental. Venice Is Sinking makes songs about moving out, breaking up, moving on, and dead pets.

Starting as a one-man band project and expanding into a five-piece two and a half years ago, Venice Is Sinking has been an Athens live fixture for some time. In 2005, the band began recording an album at Radium Recordings in bucolic Commerce, Georgia under the watchful eye of ace engineer Chris Bishop (Macha, Circulatory System). Sorry About The Flowers is the product of said sessions.

People have described the Venice Is Sinking "sound" as slightly dark, pretty pop music, heavy on the strings and keyboards. Reference points mentioned have included the Cure, Galaxie 500, Low, Hetch Hetchy (whom none of the band members has ever heard), Ida, Hugo Largo, and the Delgados.

The band's first full-length album Sorry About The Flowers was released Stateside in spring 2006 on the One Percent Press label, and will be released Chinaside in spring 2008 on Tag Team Records.

Johnnytwentythree

Johnnytwentythree is a five-piece band from Cincinnati, OH, playing giant-sized instrumental rock and combining it with powerful filmwork to create an intense viewing & listening experience.

Formed in 2003 as brothers Michael (guitar) and Joseph (bass) Maier, Joseph’s wife Brianne (violin), and longtime friends Stephen Imwalle (films) and Brian Tyree (drums), they have earned themselves a reputation as an incendiary live show.

Their first release, Thirty Pieces of Silver (2004), was a soundtrack to a documentary film by Stephen about an abandoned cemetery for the unknown. Their latest release, JXXIII (2007) is a visceral reaction to war, and includes 3 short films. JXXIII will be released Chinaside in summer 08.

RandomK(e)

Formed in 2004, RandomK(e) are quite possibly the burliest group of dudes ever to assemble on a Beijing stage…ever. The band benefits from the wildly disparate musical backgrounds of its constituent parts. Vocalist/ Guitarist Richard Todd brings slabs of punk and DIY/ post-punk to the party, despite singing like a down-to-earth Ian Gillan with emphysema; Bassist Adam Pillsbury plays his instrument like the bastard child of Bootsy Collins and Charles Mingus; double-bassist/ laptop terrorist/ gadget fiddler/ knob twiddler general Jackson Garland adds unobtrusive electronic textures to the music that you may only notice by their absence and while drummer Jon Campbell's hair screams Grateful Dead, his beats can whisper Buddy Rich or wail Bill Ward.

The Submissionaries

Infamous multi-national mess-rockers The Submissionaries stopped drinking long enough to stumble into Han Tang Studios in Beijing to record what would become the Royal Jelly EP (ok, they drank there as well), a four song opus written primarily by Canadian Kelso Sorensen and American Gregg Vossler and mixed by the venerable Andy Brown and Lonely China Day mastermind Deng Pei. Intentionally lo-fi, The Royal Jelly EP rediscovers territory once inhabited by such luminaries as Blonde Redhead, Val Kilmer, Pavement and Spotswood of Team America fame. Turn these influences on their heads, add Ingela Pelomaki screaming in Swedish and you're left with none other than The Submissionaries. Known around Beijing for their shambolic live shows, which generally contain profane nudity, unintentionally broken instruments, blown PA's and absurdly foul language, these guys ain't foolin' around (with anything but your girlfriend)...seriously!