Events

[EMO] It’s difficult to find a music head who wasn’t in a band in high school. If you’re a 20-something, or in my case a 30-something now (oh dear lord), then you grew up in a time when emo dominated the underground and the airwaves. When I was 16 I played bass in a pop-punk band called No Looking Back. We scheduled our first show without a lead singer, and as this glaring issue became more pressing, we eventually coerced my then 13-year-old brother, Brett, into becoming our lead singer on about 10 days notice. We threw together some melodramatic lyrics and cranked up the distortion on our guitars and drowned out his vocals the best we could, and it was probably horrible, but I guess looking back we’d call it emo music.

Now, in the wake of what is becoming a full-blown emo resurgence, the local music blog buffaBLOG celebrates this overdriven, melodramatic music that we love (though most of us now probably won’t admit it) with a semi-regular emo night dubbed Taking Back Saturday at Milkie’s on Elmwood. The next one, this Saturday, December 3, features yours truly and my brother, Brett Perla, also of the indie rock band Mutual Friends. We’ll play tracks back to back from the whole spectrum of emo, but with a focus on the borderline pop-punk stuff from the early 2000s. Derek Neuland of Buffaloshows.net will be on hand spinning classic emo tunes, but he’ll likely dive deeper into the late 1990s—expect some Promise Ring, Texas Is the Reason, Jawbreaker, and more. Finally, Jon Coric of indie rock band the Traditional will join in on the fun too, playing his favorites, which will probably include some Taking Back Sunday, lest the namesake of this sacred night be betrayed. Attendees are encouraged to wear their favorite discontinued band t-shirt, if it still fits (and maybe even if it doesn’t).