When Pandas Attack
Hey, you know what doesn’t go together? Heavy drinking and visiting the zoo. Unfortunately, some people have had to learn this the hard way—like Zhang Xinyan, the “drunken Chinese tourist” who quaffed four pints of beer and then decided to wander into the pen of Beijing’s beloved panda Gu Gu in search of a hug. When Gu Gu responded by taking chunks out of his leg, Xinyan reciprocated by biting the panda’s back, later telling the press that, “No one ever said they would bite people.” Even grading on a “fucked up moron” learning curve, that’s a fairly ridiculous statement: Of course pandas will bite people. Pandas can and do attack all the time, and in fact Gu Gu himself has already sunk his teeth into two other tourists in the last year—once last October, when he attacked a teenager who wandered into his exercise area “out of curiosity,” and another in January, when he bit a man so hard that the his jaws literally had to be pried loose from the man's shredded ligaments, and all because the guy was trying to retrieve (irony alert!) his child’s stuffed panda toy. In short: “When” doesn’t even really enter into it. Pandas may look like the walking definition of “cuddle,” but they are first and foremost bears, and bears are always on the attack.
Hey, you know what else doesn’t go together? The faux-Freaky Styley funk licks (sweetened with plenty of jarringly muffed notes) of San Marcos’ When Pandas Attack, mixed with its female singer’s discomfitingly brawny, “third lead in a high school musical” voice. Maybe it’s because the group’s sonic palette is so limited—listed influences on its MySpace page include "Incubus, The Toadies, and Red Hot Chili Peppers" (hence its not-at-all-obvious song “Blood Sugar”)—or maybe it’s because the group could stand to run the gauntlet of playing live more often instead of chasing its own tail in the rehearsal room (and posing for publicity photos), but something about WPA reeks of another animal that’s spent too long penned up in its own cage. Enter it at your own peril when the band plays Red Eyed Fly on Sunday.
