As men­tioned in the Gig of the Week this week, three for­eign acts are blaz­ing through the city this week — Half Mile Radius (a Taiwan-based American/Chinese rock act), ONC (Japan­ese punk group), and Shuhari (long-haired Japan­ese post-rockers). They’re play­ing every night this week­end, and last night they did Yugong Yis­han, with the cheap­est cover charge at 30RMB. Despite that, the crowd was small; I guess every­one else was either at the abortive open­ing night of Tem­ple, or a few doors down at the first Tiger Trans­late night with Queen Sea Big Shark play­ing to what I imag­ine was a sti­flingly packed Mao Live­house. I really think that these three bands will find a bet­ter home at D-22 — which they are play­ing tonight, and if you’re not mak­ing the trek to Ray­ing tonight, get out there for it because it will rock — and Mao Live­house on Sun­day. Yugong Yis­han is a ter­ri­ble place for a small crowd — it just seems lonely and that gives nei­ther crowd nor band a good vibe to play off.

How­ever, against these atmos­pheric odds, it was a good night. Half Mile Radius opened the show, and while I was dis­tracted by the lead singer’s voice being a bizarre mix of Eddie Ved­der and Brian Molko, and one of the few crazy hippy dancers (usu­ally found at music fes­ti­vals) I’ve seen in China own­ing the front of the pit, I still enjoyed their act. There’s not much to say about them, though I appre­ci­ated that they knew how to intro­duce them­selves to the crowd, and the Chi­nese mem­ber of the group had an adorable Tai­wanese accent. (Then again, almost every­thing about Tai­wan can be described as “adorable”.)

Next up was ONC, and it was in see­ing these guys that I real­ized I haven’t seen a true punk act in a long time. China does punk well, but so does Japan, and these guys were great. They took lots of cues from clas­sic punk, but they mod­ern­ized it with­out sound­ing like the ter­ri­ble pop punk sound many groups end up with. They also intro­duced a reg­gae ele­ment to their set, invit­ing up a tall black friend of theirs with impres­sively long dread­locks to sing a cou­ple of songs. All in all, they had an incred­i­ble energy and it was this band that con­vinced me that this show will shine in D-22.

After the mass exo­dus that fol­lowed ONC came arguably the best band of the night. I don’t know why every­one left, but I’m glad that just the peo­ple who were into it (includ­ing the extremely drunk bands that had already played). Shuhari is a great exam­ple of a post-rock group, com­plete with the long hair and unnec­es­sar­ily awkwardly-positioned mic stands. They some­times sounded a lit­tle like Explo­sions in the Sky, but with­out the whimsy. They had a dark edge to them that I really loved, even through the long peri­ods of play­ing with feed­back with their gui­tars on the ground. They’ll also absolutely kill it at D-22, and I hope peo­ple stick around for them there.

If you can’t get out to D-22 to see these three tonight, make a night of it at Mao Live­house on Sun­day because it’s def­i­nitely worth it!