emily the band & twice a week @ underworld, taipei
Last night I went to see Emily the Band and twice a week at Underworld in Taipei. Underworld is on Shi-Da Rd near National Taiwan Normal University[1].
Underworld is a small room, possibly smaller than the live area of the Hemlock, with a bar at one side and a band area–I would say a stage area, but there wasn’t a stage–at the end. It was a pretty cozy atmosphere. The crowd as I walked in looked familiar. It seemed there were the same characters I see at indie rock shows in America but in Taipei. They were Taiwanese, so they weren’t exactly the same. The cover this night was about $10 and that included a drink.
Smoking’s still allowed indoors at clubs apparently, so I stood there, drinking down my Taiwan Beer (the brown bottle version, alas, they didn’t have the green bottle; 24 oz.) and breathing in enough second-hand smoke to make me older by the time I left, but, at least for the first chunk of the show, it made me feel oddly nostalgic for my time hunkered in the Middle East downstairs in Cambridge during my college years.
I had heard of Emily (or Emily the Band, I’m not quite sure) a couple weeks ago, perhaps via They Came from Taiwan, while looking for Taipei indie rock bands. Their stuff sounded decent so I made a note to check them out when I had a chance. The stuff on their myspace page is all fairly consistently dark, reverb-filled and heavy. Their live set was a lot more varied, going from that sort of stuff, to garagey blues-form rock to almost upbeat stuff. They were a standard rock quartet: singer/ guitarist, guitarist, bass, drums. They were dressed fairly familiarly, too: the singer is a shiny metallic dress and fishnet stockings, the guitarist in the button down shirt and sweater vest prep look, the bass player and drummer in the standard band-wear t-shirt.
Their stage presence, stage banter and crowd interaction were awesome. Or, I should say, appeared to be awesome. My Chinese is minimal so I didn’t follow what they were saying, just the back-and-forth with the crowd that happened. Additionally, the band would walk out into the crowd. The guitarist at two different points did the following: walked out and drank an audience member’s beer and later rocked out on a guitar solo right up in a few people’s faces, including my own. It was pretty fantastic.
During the short (very short by what I’m used to) set change, they played Four Tet’s “As Serious as Your Life” (off of Rounds) which was good in two ways: 1) I realized it wasn’t just a bunch of yahoos running the club but people that knew something and 2) reminded that I should listen to more Four Tet.
After the set change (which lasted about as long as it took to go to the bathroom) Twice a Week was up. They were another standard two guitars, bass, drums set up. They were all college or post-college age guys wearing the standard band outfit: slightly too-tight t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that are cheap enough that make it like you don’t care when you really do, or maybe you don’t, who knows? Anyway, their set was solidly under a layer of reverb, echo, and feedback with some distortion and frenetic strumming in there as well. If it wasn’t as heavy, it might have been called “dreamy” or even classified as shoe-gaze. It was a decent set.
Their last song (before the one-song encore) was definitely a little bit more poppy. I just realized it was a cover of Emily’s “Not Exist”, which you can hear at their myspace.
Man, it was good to see some live rock. It’d been a while.
[1] “I really wanted to go to National Taiwan Abnormal University but I didn’t get in.”
