of american bands & chinese band-names.

"Xiu Xiu" conjures to mind a girl bending over a green grass patch smelling (sniffing?) flowers, and "Saosin" a wet blanket. no?

Perhaps for the chinese-savvy. But it definitely works well as a marketing strategy to name your band like so. The anally curious have a strong need to dig out your entire history log and do a thorough traceback on the roots of your bizarre bandname that far surpasses randomness.

Whereas XiuXiu (pronounced shoe-shoe, according to Wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiu_xiu) is way more experimental, and comes up with music that is sometimes too much for a non-experimental crowd (they dabble with noise, for instance), Saosin is, i'm proud to say, not at all a wet-blanket. Basically a hardcore rock band, they are equally capable of producing stuff that could appeal to the mainstream population, my fave of which is the track "You're Not Alone" off their album in 2006.

But before I put up the vid and let blogger do its routine hanging/lagging on me (note to blogger.com: how about blagger.com for a sister site?!), some interesting trivia on the derivation of Saosin's bandname from our friend Wiki:

"It’s pronounced SAY-OCEAN, and it’s a Chinese proverb from the 15th and 16th centuries. It means “small heart”. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saosin

Hmm.Gotta ponder on that one.Perhaps "xiaoxing" doesn't look as cool for a bandname, eh?

Whatever it is, we've gotta give these dudes much credit for daring to be different. (Actually, this suddenly brings to mind an acquaintance from US who showed me her tattoo once. She said it was supposed to be a chinese character for power or something. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it wasnt a chinese word at all. On the bright side tho, it was nicely done.)

Check Saosin out here! Enjoy the vid.