Coming from a country without free speech, it’s appropriate that Beijing’s Hang on the Box sings in a foreign tongue and sings it poorly. It’s not that vocalist Wang Yue sounds unpleasant, but rather poor in the grammatical sense.

Released in 2001 on the Japanese label Sister, Yellow Banana is the debut from the all-girl punk outfit. Hang on the Box doesn’t provide the angry and apocalyptic political overtones of early British punk rock expected from a Chinese band. Perhaps being a Chinese punk band is a political statement in itself. The quartet embraces the classic punk idioms of lo-fi production, charging guitars and three-chord progressions. Simply put, with a sound and technique that can be duplicated by your eighth-grade neighbor, Hang on the Box relies on their insurgent exuberance and inimitable vocals to charm listeners.

Appropriately enough, the first and title track starts with the drowned-out, drunk voices of a party. The band is introduced in roll call fashion with drums, then bass, guitar and finally vocals. The song drives along with intermittent stops for the band to catch its breath and start partying again. If listeners didn’t know better, they wouldn’t know what language Wang sings in (mostly English), as it’s unintentionally muffled and sloppy, but nonetheless charming.

Hang on the Box, especially Wang, has a raw draw to it that goes beyond novelty. They’re not iconoclasts or anti-popstars to an American audience, but the pop heroes you really wish you could be. It’s not just their assumed naïveté or appealing image but their impetus of drunken fun ranges from the longingly somber to the deepest screams. They roll through songs with the same extroverted intensity as a first-year rolling joints.

To truly understand their zeal you must listen not so much to what they are, but what they’re not. There isn’t the punk discord but dissidence, like on “No Sexy” Wang shouts “I gotta go!” presumably to get sexy or some sexy, but ends up frustrated and heartbroken. Hang on the Box might just be the product of Chinese punk’s nascence, but they don’t deceive themselves by being too serious to be taken seriously.

It’s not all drunken fun, but a detached reasonability that gives Wang the ability to sing, “Rape you, rape you/Are you ready?/I’m a real girl,” on “Ass Hole, I’m Not Your Baby” juxtaposed to, “I’m feeling myself wet inside/And I’m tired of waiting for you” on the anthem “OoOo.” Wang and Co. aren’t just punkophiles with their “Oi Ois,” and “Arsehole” chants but heady 20-somethings living as mere specs in the world’s most populated country.

What might be more important when listening to Hang on the Box is not its love of punk’s vernacular and things styled punk, but that urban and suburban China might not be as inherently different from America as we think. Hang on the Box tells us so through the same frustrations that countless bands, good and bad, sing incessantly about, whether it may be sexual or societal, it all somehow levels off to relevance.

Find Hang on the Box mp3s at www.hangonthebox.com and www.sister.co.jp.