Music: Slit at Shuffle Bar

Shanghaiist doesn't know much about emocore or nu-metal (can you be both at once?), but we decided to give local band Slit a listen while they were performing last night at Shuffle, a new music venue on Xingfu Lu, a stone's throw from where the old Tang Hui rock bar was. Shuffle just opened (on December 31 we believe), so there weren't too many patrons there, but that kind of suited us just as well since we hate crowds anyway. The place is decorated/designed in a minimalist warehouse way, and the peanuts are free and plentiful, and you can even throw the shells on the ground. Back to Slit -- we like the frontman's dark tortured artists thing, especially the crawling on the floor punctuated by epileptic fits. The music we thought catchy, if that's the word for this kind of thing -- the guitar riffs could be rousing and the singer's falsetto howls were eerily captivating -- but maybe we're getting too old for this stuff because it's hard for us, as audience members, to keep that buzz going when we have no idea what the lyrics are and are running low on whatever unnamed angst fuels this music. That said, we look forward to the day where this band gets a little more polished because we feel that while they aren't going to be the staple of our live music world (and that's just personal preference), they are a welcome injection of a little something different in what otherwise would be a scene of dreary sameness. Shuffle is going to have more acts of different genres, which we think a good idea, financially as well as "artistically". Definitely something to keep your eye on.

Photo by Peijin Chen.