howdy! sorry i missed yesterday's post, our monday show kicked my ASS.
our tour kickoff show in LA went fucking awesome. pradafursuit, teather, & tracey brakes all put on absolutely killer sets. according to some sources, ours was pretty good too. here's some pics from that.
pictured: me after a day-of-show practice sesh
pictured: slightly tacky bathroom art
pictured: I am now rich in $teather
pictured: me! playing guitar!
photographed by Aubrey Richards. the full photo album can be found here
yesterday was very restful. i spent most of it watching more evangelion. i'm really glad i'm revisiting this show - i don't think i properly appreciated it on my first watch. it's so... bleak. the horror of watching all these people with rich internal lives fight against a force they hardly understand, knowing it's all futile, but what else are you gonna do? risking sounding like a complete dweeb here, but - it's very resonant in our Current Age. yeah yeah, base level analysis, whatever. i'll have more interesting things to say when I finish.
that's all for now! excited to share more once we're on the road (starting this sunday).
touched down in LA late saturday evening, got some canes (thank God for canes) immediately passed out. cleo's bed is super comfy & her cats have been so sweet (pictured below is t-shirt). we got in a solid full-band practice and... we fucking RIP. absolutely shredding. my vocal cords are not happy with me.
our friend jules (@grrumble on Websites) designed some really cute stickers (pictured below), and cleo stayed up printing them while i laid in bed watching the original 90s eva dvd dub. it's surprisingly good. gives the show a slightly different tone, but it makes the darker moments hit a little harder. asuka's voice is pretty grating, though. my friend leo told me there's more of the gay stuff than in the netflix cut, but i'll believe it when i see it.
tonight we play LA! los angeles, you are so spoiled. i don't even live here and yet this is the fourth saoirse dream show in the area within a year. our CDs came in just in time, so we'll be able to bring some tonight & on the rest of the tour!!! really exciting. eeee!!!!!!!!!
okay, that's all for today. will have more to update with once we're in full swing, which will start in chicago this sunday. all show deets are on my upcoming shows page. love y'all!! thanks for reading!!
hey everyone ^w^ let's kick things off simple style with a lil roundup of songs i've been into the past couple weeks. this segment updates every tuesday.
12 RODS - I Wish You Were A Girl
12 RODS are one of those glaring holes in my alt rock history. this band has everything i like (off-kilter vocal performances laden with blue notes, somewhere between shoegaze and 2nd-wave emo guitarisms, a gay bald guy), and they've been recommended to me many times! somehow in the year of our lord 2025 i am just now sitting down with their music. my first thought upon hearing this song was "hah it's like reverse Snail Mail" and i immediately realized how fucking stupid that sounded. it's always interesting finding a new core influence of one of your more contemporary favs. "I Wish You Were A Girl" tells the all-too-common story of regretful gay romance, peeling back the layers of self-loathing and societal pressures, culminating in the crushing "I'm sinning for another answer / I'm sinning for my right to care / I'm laughing, but it's not so funny / So take me far away from here". and just when you think it's over, the vocals drifting away in a beautiful echo, the coda hits you with a full-force rendition of the entrancing instrumental. ugh dude i fucking love this song. it makes me write shit like this. go listen to it.
venturing - Believe
i like Ghostholding well enough, but this track really jumped out at me. calling upon the country-gaze (can't we think of a better term for it) movement in current-year indie rock, "Believe" adds the unexpected flavor of being... funky as fuck. there are some absolutely crazy runs on this track. the vocal control on "baby beLIEveINmEE", the flangey guitar lick underneath an effortless "Jesus don't like bitches, I was floating downstream" ... she's almost giving thundercat. plus, the unusual structure and pace of rhythm & meter is a great touch. really feels like you're being taken for a drive.
Oklou - ict
fuck emo bands using trumpet! we're putting trumpets in french micropop now! to the people calling choke enough "nothing" - you gotta get your ears checked, cause this is a whole lot of something. just when "ict" lulls you into tranquility, the track's midpoint hits you with a deep reese base, building drums, vocals looping over themselves, the exact kind of "pre-drop" tropes you'd expect to leave you with a pretty-okay house section. instead of doing that, Oklou, Casey MQ, & A.G. Cook give us an anti-drop; a third progression change in a 3-minute trance tune. if i ever write an arpeggio half as good as this one, all my life goals will be satisfied. must-listen.
Weatherday - Angel
i first got into Weatherday in like 2019, during the transition between my full-swing shoegaze phase and full-swing emo phase. Come In i s a great record, but i felt like something was missing, something wasn't grabbing me, there was the potential for something more.
i got exactly what i wanted.
"Angel" (and its b-side "Heartbeats") feel like they were created in a lab to turn me into a massive Weatherday fan. in developing Weatherday's sound past shaky bedroom mixes, far more is gained than lost. the drums are punchy, the bass is thick, the guitars are deliciously crunchy, and i can finally hear the fucking vocal harmonies. i can't entirely explain it (as i'm writing this, i still haven't actually looked up the lyrics) but something about the line "It must have looked like we were playing, making two snow angels" calls forth from me a gut-wrenching yet inexplicable core emotion. it takes a lot of songwriting prowess and confidence in vocal performance to make such tech-y riffs play second fiddle to the vocals, and outside of Anita Velveeta, Weatherday is the only person i can think of who's out there doing it.
i'll be updating daily while i'm on tour. this blog is intended as a replacement for my non-professional presence on sites like Twitter & Instagram. i want to divest from state-controlled social media that actively funds right-wing political interests.
for now, here's some links :3
almost all of my work is archived and available on bandcamp. you can find a couple more loose uploads on my soundcloud. my self-titled third album comes out on february 28th on lauren records, and you can find CDs & Vinyl here. i'm going on an east coast tour starting february 24th. gonna try adding a calendar widget to this site, where i will host links to those shows.
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