As so often happens with debut albums, the sessions for Smoosh's She Like Electric were fraught. The band was inexperienced, and became overexcited. There were disagreements with their "mentor," Jason McGerr of US college-rock stalwarts Death Cab for Cutie. Eventually, things got so out of control that McGerr was forced to lock Smoosh's drummer, Chloe, out of the studio.
"The next thing I know, there's a tap on the window of the studio control room and Chloe's standing there with a little piece of paper, on which she's written, `Do you want to fight?'"
He laughs a slightly baffled-sounding laugh. It's a sound you swiftly get used to when discussing Smoosh. Everyone seems slightly baffled by the band -- from McGerr, who discovered the duo while teaching at a Seattle drum school, to their manager and father, Mike, who recently spotted them hanging out backstage when they supported Pearl Jam.
He found himself "scratching my head in awe. They were playing with Eddie Vedder -- not playing instruments, just playing, throwing oranges around and stuff. I peeked in, saw that, and thought, `This is crazy.'"
And then there's the audiences, who, McGerr says, tend to react to Smoosh's live performances with "a funny look of amazement."
The only people who aren't slightly baffled are Smoosh themselves, who seem to think a critically acclaimed rock band consisting of two sisters, one 13 years old and one 11, is the very height of normality.
"We didn't really decide to be in a band," says Asya, 13, who writes the songs, plays keyboard and sings. "It just happened." Her younger sister was taking drum lessons from McGerr, inspired by the sight of "this really cool sparkly red drum set."
One day, Asya told McGerr that she wrote songs on a keyboard at home. He was, he says, "just startled."
"I think that for a lot of musicians who've been doing this for a long time, when we see youth having so much effortless fun creating songs, it rekindles our initial feelings and love for music. That's what's happening with a lot of these artists who want to perform with them. To see an 11-year-old bang her head while playing the drums ..." he sighs. "It's awesome."
Teenage kicks
Their celebrity fans include Sufjan Stevens, Sleater-Kinney, the Go! Team and Bloc Party. For their part, the sisters are unruffled by their success. Nerves certainly don't seem to be an issue. Chloe prefers playing big shows to their early performances two years ago at open-mic events in Seattle.
Then, she feared, "people were just clapping because they thought it was so cute that we were singing." And no, says Asya, she doesn't get nervous on stage, or meeting rock stars. "We're all just doing the same thing."
Even the actor Tobey Maguire was greeted with a degree of coolness when he ventured backstage after a show in Los Angeles.
"He'd heard us and wanted to see us," Asya says with a shrug.
Despite their insouciance, there is something very impressive about She Like Electric, whose title was conceived when the pair were playing on the trampoline in their back garden. For a start, there's the fact that sisters aged 13 and 11 could work together without a terrible eruption of sibling violence.
There is the occasional spat, though. "We fight when Asya's being annoying," confides Chloe. "She's like, `You're not doing that right! I'm doing it right and I have to sing and play the piano and you just have to play the drums and you're not doing it right!' Then I get really mad, and I say, `Why are you acting like my mother?'"
Then there's the musical content. America is a country with an alarmingly high cuteness threshold, but She Like Electric is no sickly novelty. Instead, it's a collection of sparse, exhilaratingly skewed pop songs, powered by Asya's high, slurred vocals, untutored electric-piano playing and her sister's booming drums.
Young, gifted and girls
You occasionally catch the hint of an influence -- a snatch of Tori Amos on the exquisitely melancholy It's Cold, a trace of hip-hop on Rad and the frantic Bottlenose -- but most of it sounds like nothing else.
That may be because, as Chloe puts it, they "didn't really know that much music" before they started the band. (One journalist breathlessly informed the duo that they could be "bigger than Led Zeppelin," only to be met with the question: "Is that big?")
Asya says her inspiration comes "from poetry and stuff. I never write songs about anything in particular, just stuff. We're pretty optimistic, about going out there and working hard."
Smoosh's future is open. "They don't have goals," says their dad. "They're not treating this like a stepping stone. I ask them, `Does this sound fun?' and if they say yes, I set it up."
McGerr thinks "their talents are growing as quickly as their heights," but notes that Smoosh are subject to the kind of distractions few other rock bands face. "At any time, they could have a show planned and one of them would much rather go on a field trip with the class."
"I think the worst thing that could happen is Chloe borrows Asya's coat and gets a stain on it," he adds. "Then there's potentially a canceled tour. It really comes down to stuff like that."
Then he laughs another slightly baffled-sounding laugh.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby