China is still a country where you go to jail if you disagree too publicly with the government, where people work in horrible conditions for little money, to provide us with most of the cheap consumer products that we buy at Wal-Mart. It's a country where a million people will die of a disease, the government says doesn't exist, and millions of others live in conditions of such extreme destitution that we couldn't even begin to understand what it was like. For all the Brave New Face of China that the pundits and business people like to drool over it is no different from the China that sent tanks into the street against its own people in the late 1980s.

Listening to Look Directly Into The Sun creates a weird sense of temporal displacement as it sounds like listening to punk/new wave circa 1982 when Factory Records in Manchester was churning out album after album of music from disaffected youth being ground under the boot of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. I heard everything from the punk energy of the Clash to the high introspection of Joy Division.

The thing is, I never got the impression that bands like Carsick Cars, Snapline, or Rococo were imitating anybody, There was nothing artificial about their sound or their emotions; none of the posing or pseudo cool that I'd expect from youth their age in almost any other country. They sound like they're discovering the incredible freedom and release that comes from playing with abandon and getting lost in that moment.

Like their counterparts in England in the early 1960s, late 1970s, and early 1980s, and America in the 1950s and 1960s what else do they have in their lives to give them that sense of breaking free? A term in the army oppressing their own people or occupying Tibet and other Himalayan countries? A gruelling job in a factory where industrial accidents are the norm, the hours are long and the pay sucks? Or going to school and learning all the official history and skills that will be of use to the state and eventually being sucked up into the party system to become another cog that keeps the wheels moving?

Options in the West were a hell of a lot better then that and it still gave birth to Rock and Roll in the 1950s, Acid Rock in the Sixties, and Punk in the late Seventies - so it's no wonder that young people in China are creating music that's as volatile and exciting as the stuff that's on Look Directly Into The Sun. The wonder to me is how long they will be allowed to get away with it. I'm sure the whole scene is being carefully monitored and it only exists because for now it is tolerated - but if any signs of unrest became apparent - even a whiff of dissent, you can be sure that all the clubs would be closed for health violations and the music would be banned for being in violation of noise regulations.