Arriving at **The Shelter** on its opening night for the **Antidote party** about a month and a half ago I was disgusted.  Having come from the smokey intimacy of **The Rogue Transmission’s** first full live show at Logo (complete with frontman songster **Dan Shapiro** sweaty and bare-chested) how could I enjoy the dark pounding pandemonium of that transformed bomb shelter?  As I descended from the quiet of Yongfu lu downward into the depths of what I thought was dance-club hell, the gin (a gentleman’s drink) coursing through my blood began tipping me towards a suborn bold rejection of “the new”.  I need to be honest; I have never been partial to the DJ culture of Shanghai and indeed know very little about it.  That night I spent twenty minutes at The Shelter, ten of which I was complaining and the other ten losing a battle to stop my hips from beginning to shake and my feet to dance.  I left, as I had arrived, drunk, disoriented and leaning heavily on the cave wall.

I did not return to the Shelter again until last Thursday night when the S.T.D. crew hosted the Cyberpunk event. It was an experiment, with two live bands (Angry Jerks and Boys Climbing Ropes) on the bill; a first for the venue. Having been away from Shanghai for approximately a month I had missed the Shelter’s rise to prestige in street credibility amongst alternative bar goers. The bad taste lingering in my mouth from my last visit still left me wary about liking the place. Mostly I was excited about the possibility that this could become a new site for the ever-struggling underground live music scene in the city.

Arriving early for sound check and to help set up the equipment I was greeted by the same cavernous plunge into the abyss like bar. The echoes in that dark hallway, before you reach the actual innards of the place, compounded my skepticism about hosting live music in an old bomb shelter. I was certain it was going to be a chaotic wall of reverberating noise as soon as the drummer picked up his sticks. After an hour the “stage” was set up and I found myself pleasantly located on a long couch, which smelled of stale smoke and booze. Sipping a Qingdao and messing around on my guitar I began to realize that in my drunken, fervorish, ignorance of a month and half before I had failed to notice there was more to this bar than what I had perceived as an intimidating labyrinth of writhing bodies and blackness.

It was not until sound check was over that all of my previous distaste had faded. As far as I am concerned The Shelter defied all acoustic odds and actually lended itself quite well to live music. The wall-of-noise-deafness that I anticipated was not there. Each instrument could audibly be distinguished and even the vocals came through strong enough to be present over top of the drums. Because the space was set up so well for DJs, the P.A. system was definitely wired for quality sound projection. Instead of reverberating off the low roof and thick walls the sound carried off down the hallways on each side of the room and dissipated into the smaller rooms in the back. The bodies that filled the room later also helped to dampen the sound keeping it more localized around the band.

By the time The Angry Jerks plugged in there was a welcoming crowd who immediately began moshing enthusiastically around the huge brick pillars framing (and slightly obscuring) the stage. As is usually the case with Shanghai concert-goers we were all zealously and reverently enjoying the performers energy. With RMB20 drinks in hand and one of the better bands on the mainland rocking out in our face it was once again easy to feel optimistic (even after the downfall of 4live) about Shanghai’s music scene.

The bar may lack clean air, it may play host to myriad forms of music that I fail to understand and it sometimes may even include the odd lewd and indecent exposure of animalistic acts in the depths of its darkness but The Shelter has won yet another patron. The sound quality is unexpected, the clientele are winners and there is plenty of room for mistakes on the dark dance floor. I am not trying to write a review, I’ve barely ever been to the place, I simply want to exclaim how pleased I am that S.T.D. took the risk to put on a live show and thus melted the cold heart of displeased bastard. I anticipate a line up of shows to come in hopes that live music will find a foothold at The Shelter.