Lest I be accused of Orientalism, I’ll just flat-out state for the record that I’ve never written about a Chinese rock act before, and it has nothing to do with any horribly patronizing Western attitude toward the East, and more to do w/ the fact that I’d never even heard a Chinese rock act. So it was really some act of fortune that the first two I did hear – a few weeks ago, no less – were this band’s predecessor The Offset: Spectacles and then Gong Gong Gong themselves, both of whom were flagged for me on the same day by a fella who knows a thing or two about the underground.

Tom Ng has played guitar and sung in both Beijing-based bands, and w/ Canadian national & Chinese citizen Joshua Frank, has been generating a sort of noisy, motoring boogie blues in Gong Gong Gong for the last couple years. The 45’s a choppy, loud and heavily rhythmic amalgam of The Monks, 60s biker psych, all the colors of the rainbow and all the flavors of the world. Tense music for humid climes. I got to visit Shenzhen, China in mid-2018 and can state with my limited on-the-ground authority that there are teeming sub-undergrounds of freaks, weirdos, dopers, vinyl record fiends and punkers lurking behind the red curtain. Gong Gong Gong are among the first proof points us Occidentals get to shove into our record collections. (Wharf Cat; wharfcatrecords.com)