AV Okubo - Greed of Man （大时代） (2010, Maybe Mars)

Hailing from industrial Wuhan, AV Okubo AV 大久保 draws on the sweltering summer nights and the grinding factory noise of their home city to put on one of the best live shows in China. Their performances are electrifying and burst with a sophisticated take on the throwaway culture underlying the best pulp fiction and B-movies of the 1940s and 1950s. Playing with kitschy re-minders of China in the 1980s, just as the country was reawakening from the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and beginning to embrace Hong Kong crime movies, sexy cigarette advertisements, and the fading remnants of Socialist singalongs, they focus on the cultural detritus of their childhoods through a cynical but remarkably joyful lens, and both celebrate and condemn the experiences of growing up in newly industrializing China.

All of the band members in AVO were born in the 1980s to factory workers, and three of them work in local factories, and this clearly comes through in their music – they’ve reinterpreted their memories of pop songs and old Hong Kong movies into a beat-driven rock and roll that roll insatiable forward on cheap gas and kerosene like a rusty machine. Your brain keeps dancing for hours even after the music stops. The challenge of capturing their live energy on a CD is one that has kept Maybe Mars awake for many nights. We’re confident, however, that the solution lies in the hands of Martin Atkins, the (highly acclaimed) drummer of PiL and Ministry, and producer of NIN and Pigface. To be released in November, this is one of the most eagerly awaited releases in China’s underground scene.


These guys are so badass that they don't even have a myspace.

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