2024-03-01

i did just say that living in the city would allow me to go to concerts alone without needing to drag along transport. but i did also say i'd go see hail the sun the next time they're within a hundred miles of me. i neatly broke both statements by making my sister drive me over 3 hours and 170 miles each way to catch the nearest show of the b-market leg of their tour. when i told her they were touring again but not in our state i was like "hey wanna go on a road trip lol" and i didn't think she'd actually say yes!?!????

don't mistake my sister for being overly generous or kind; i think she was just sufficiently primed for this trip, seemingly enjoying the far more agonizing trips she's taken in the last year (including a 10 hour drive each way for a convention) and surprising me by actually getting into and continuing to listen to thank you scientist after i'd dragged her to that concert back in june.

per concert tradition we painted our nails together, and her turn to provide background entertainment had us watching paranormal investigation youtubers. in subsequently helping her assemble an outfit for the concert, i mentioned i've always wanted cool boots, and she was like "well it's only like 4pm. wanna go?"

and so we went on an impromptu trip to three different stores in search of the perfect boots. in the first i randomly found a cool hoodie instead:

the second store had price tags that scared me out of trying anything on, and the third was an adventure in itself: it was 30 minutes to closing time, i was torn between two equally expensive boots that were both close to my ideal vision, and my sister kept running off to try on boots for herself, causing me to get scolded by an employee for leaving my bag laying around when i went after my sister to seek her opinion.

i finally settled on a pair for $95, which is more than i've ever spent on a single item of apparel, but since i've been wearing the same vans for like 7 years i figured it was fine to treat myself a little. my sister tried to take advantage of my spendiness to puppy-eyes at me for the admittedly very cute $115 pair of over-the-knee boots she picked out to no avail.

when we got to the register, my boots rang up for just $30 as a result of some invisible sale that had my sister running back to grab her chosen boots to see their sale price (during which the same employee handed my forgotten umbrella to her. oops) and indeed, they were down to $40, which was conscionable enough for me to buy them for her since the total of both boots was less than i thought i'd be spending for just mine. this produced a miracle on the receipt:

i'm sorry to the cashier for going crazy about this right in front of her

with the most important step of preparation complete, we went to bed satisfied and rose the next day for departure. my sister's car, never before used for a road trip, was old enough to lack a way to connect a phone for music purposes, so i bought one of those bluetooth casette tape adapters to service an otherwise silent 6 hours of driving. tragedy would befall us in this regard: i could not get the thing to work, even after following a review's suggestion to gut it of unecessary vestigial internal components.

we're still not sure if it was the adapter or her car at fault, but either way we were left to the whims of the radio, which was made more difficult by the fact that the available stations shifted each time we crossed state lines. we ended up only using it for like a half hour at most each way before giving up, instead relying on daydreaming and my sister's road trip hobby of counting amazon trailer trucks for entertainment.

we arrived in the little beachside town housing the venue— a factor i suspect inclined my sister to agree to this trip; we're both sluts for the ocean— and checked into the inn i'd booked, a cozy and affordable thing barely a block from the water. it was my first time booking anything and i aspired to be a model guest, which i promptly ruined by spilling my open energy drink on the bed within seconds of entering our room. it's FINE i don't think it reached the mattress and if anything it smelled wonderful so was it really so terrible!?

the dark, cold, and windy closing week of november didn't stop our lust to go visit the beach. i'd made fun of my sister's plan to walk in the sand with her sneakers and found myself the fool for baring my poor feet to the freezing air in my sandals. we shivered and took pictures of the moon over the water, one of which i sent to my friend in the UK to tell her i was looking at her.

hi!!!!

we returned to our room to warm up and decide how to pass the time until the show, but couldn't think of much better than to arrive early and maybe play a quick game of bowling, because the venue is for some reason also a bowling alley. what divine luck we did, as i'd mistaken show time for door time and thus we arrived just 20 minutes before they started playing.

the venue had no such advantageous balcony area as my local one, so i opted to post us up towards the left side where we would get the best view of the handsome guitarist shane and hopefully have a decent view of the drums for allen and donovan.

i had my sister show me her phone camera settings so i could get videos as fancy as hers this time, but i planned to enjoy the show first and foremost, so she tacitly understood she was still my personal chronicler.

i hadn't "researched" this show as much as i had the prior ones, meaning i hadn't listened to the supporting acts i didn't know, and in fact i completely missed one of them on the tour schedule so i had no idea who the opening act was until they introduced themselves as glasslands. they were really good! i liked the creature (suuuper catchy) and bury my flame (which i prefer live, since some of the vocals were sung by a deep-voiced guitarist).

returning supporting act was kaonashi, and there was one member i'd seen at the last show that i thought my sister would find handsome, but he wasn't here for some reason and i lack the interest to find out why. kaonashi quickly opened the mosh pit, and my sister kept having to pull my witless self out of harm's way as the set continued. we were forced to retreat some steps from our original position and made to battle yet another poorly placed trash bin, which was later knocked completely over by someone launched out of the mosh pit like a character in a shonen anime fight.

i hadn't watched the mosh too closely from my balcony spot last show, but this one was definitely more intense than the one my sister and i had been adjacent to in our first show with the metalhead crowd, who ran into each other with the same considerate glee of adults in a bouncy castle. this show had people swinging their arms around with a velocity suited to breaking a nose.

after that the crowd shifted to settle in for sweet pill, featuring an incredibly rare woman of color as the vocalist. she surprised me with her expressive, energetic movements and rough vocals suitable for the genre, which i've simply never heard from a woman and inspires it into the realm of possibility for myself if i ever get enough of an inclination to sing.

at one point she asked us to yell on the count of four, and if we yelled loud enough "someone special might come out" for the next song. we did, and naturally it was donovan, in a christmas sweater i couldn't classify as ugly because it had a coolass dinosaur on it.

they sung a fantastic duet of one of sweet pill's songs— and here i was reminded of some weeks prior when i'd shown my sister a nova charisma song for its cool synth opener, and she made a comment referring to the vocalist as "she" because i hadn't reminded her that nova charisma's vocalist is donovan. after the donovan-sweet pill duet i leaned over to her ear and forgave her, because there really was such a slim margin between donovan's voice and sweet pill's vocalist, a testament to the high girlishness of his voice and the cool masculine quality of hers. it was a splendid match through and through.

then hail the sun's set— cool as ever, and to my ears very notably fresher than the last show when i heard they'd been a little sick. donovan didn't have to abandon long notes nearly as early or outsource lines to the crowd to conserve breath nearly as often, being in much better form overall.

live shows make me appreciate all the little things a band can do to transform a selection of songs into a unique experience. a list of some examples:

i was reminded of the first live footage i'd ever viewed online of hail the sun, at an outdoor concert with continuous footage from a viewpoint towards the left much like mine. my curiosity had been naturally piqued by a drummer-vocalist, so both my eyes and the footage's zoom level were trained on donovan, but shane kept swaying in and out of being an obstruction to the view almost as if on purpose. i'd fallen prey to that exact predicament here.

at least shane has nice arms

i dutifully began recording every time a new song was about to begin in my fervent desire to capture the entirety of relax/divide this time— i succeeded, but it is to my profound dismay that the singing-along of some nearby drunk audience members is very audible, and donovan didn't do anything particularly interesting. in the end, i prefer my recording from the last show, despite me lacking the first two lines... alas! i will catch it all once more at my local venue's balcony next time for my third attempt.

they then followed up with rolling out the red carpet, another song with a storied presence at pretty much every show, a move so legendary that i heard a group behind me sputtering with glee that "they did it!", and indeed having these two songs back to back seemed destined to occur someday. donovan told us "this song is meant to be sung together", and i was more than happy to oblige, but it made me go "huh lol!?" in the face of what the song is about. what are you asking us to partake in with you, donovan...

part of the reason i was so dead-set on going to this show was that it was after their new album released, so there was a chance any of the new songs could be played and i didn't want to miss them. and just for me they played the one i and many others were hoping for: 60-minute session blocks. my recording is very funny to rewatch because i'd had my camera pointing down in wait until donovan said the title, and i let out the most guttural "WOOOO" of my life and swung the camera up to catch the whole thing. it was one of few songs i sang along to, and i was happy to hear so many others singing too, knowing that the song had just come out a couple months ago and already had this much memorization and love by fans.

rewatching the clips my sister and i took, it's funny seeing which moments we each decided to capture, and that my sister more often than not completely focused her zoom and composition around donovan. i'd never do that, just for the sake of capturing the full context of the band, but i have to admit some of her clips are very nice to look at. donovan and his beautiful mane of hair...

do you also see the sheen on his arm.... i have a new thing now

they were called back for an encore, and here my memory became deeply confused. i'd later seen the official setlist, so i know they should have played suffocating syndrome → tunnel vision alibi → glass: half-empty. so why couldn't i remember suffocating syndrome, one of my growing favorites of its album, that mysteriously neither my sister or i captured any recordings of...!? my sister is certain there were three songs in the encore, but i only remembered the latter two. i don't know what happened to make my head completely void of a song i know i was looking forward to the possibility of hearing live. well, another box to try and check at the next show...

so that was that, and it was time to check out the merch tables. my sister puppy-eyed at me a second time as we glanced at the glasslands table with a miserably vacant line, as they had a pretty cool tshirt and my sister had clearly become very taken with their short but impressive opening act. but we'd literally both just become aware of the band so i couldn't justify it in my heart... especially as i was already paying for her car's terrible gas mileage. this became more tragic as time went on after the concert and my sister ended up fully falling in love with glasslands and bought one of their cds through their online store, which i have now been made to listen to every time i get in her car to go anywhere. alas, that tshirt was a tour-only thing, so she'll have to wait until they manage to go on tour again to get another chance.

i got in line for the hts merch table and once again found myself uninspired by the apparel offerings; i decided to wait instead for the new monthly merch drops hts started doing at the beginning of november, which i woefully missed... i've since bought things from the january and february merch drops that i'm very happy with.

i have been wanting to buy wake on cd for MONTHS now and they again didn't have it at the merch table, so i left with just cds of the albums mental knife and culture scars, which i'd been starting to get into just prior to the concert and needed in order to fill out my collection. i literally cannot find any official way to buy wake cd online. hts please reprint your most popular album on cd so i can give you money onegai and shimasu.

after all of that, we were both fairly hungry and made an 11pm trip to the local taco bell. this is only notable because the interior dining was closed so we had to order via the drive-thru, which my sister is deathly afraid of, so i sat in the rear left seat and she pulled up a little farther so i could do the order for her. something about 11pm taco bell hits different and hits good.

we slept in our cozy room and i managed to get my long-sleeping sister to the inn's free breakfast buffet before 10am. it was sooooooo good, they had all the breakfast staples freshly cooked by this one woman who'd serve it to you right from the cooking implements. being november in a beach town, i was surprised there were any other guests there at all, but it was only three other people so our breakfast pickings weren't impacted.

we then prepared to depart, and i thought myself clever for now having music to play in the car since my sister's car has a cd player. unfortunately she didn't really vibe with either of my new cds (understandable; i feel like these two are the less approachable of hts's albums) so i only got to play a few songs before we switched back to radio hunting and terminated into silence. tangentially, i realized how much i was starting to love doing the same thing and expecting different results, which they played at the first show to much excitement by the crowd, but not at this show. i miss u... come back... please don't be a rare thing...

we returned home and my sister had me watch some horror video game let's plays while i cooed over the cat that i missed so terribly. one of my brothers had just gotten a new phone known for its especially nice camera (google pixel), so at one point we'd all crowded around the cat to take similar pictures for comparison, with my sister batting at some hanging objects to get the cat to look towards us. she's a very small cat so it looked extra comical.

artistic reindition

and then i had to go straight to work the next day and be normal about everything.

i'd gotten to writing this entry so late that many things have already been announced, such as hail the sun's next tour co-heading with intervals, who i'd not heard of. i broke a third statement— i said after my first hts show that i wanted to get a vip ticket next time, but the road trip expenses and a second person meant it was pretty out of budget. so i really wanted this third show to be the time, but...... it's twice the price because it's vip for both the bands, lol........ NEXT TIME AFTER THAT FOR SURE!

i've also seen on hts's socials that they plan to play songs that haven't been played live yet on the next tour. the long-awaited tithe or little song could appear...! but personally i'm looking forward to possibly hearing the story writes itself, and a small shred of hope for (in my dream) and i saw you hanging. they like to use slow/low intensity songs strategically throughout sets to preserve energy, so including dream as the prelude to hanging could be a good fit... those two songs being a pair is unlike anything else they've written, so i'm not sure what to expect for their live appearances. contending with three other popular yet-unseen songs is tough competition, though...

also on my setlist wishlist is anti-eulogy (i hope you stay dead), cuz it's one of my overall faves and as far as i can tell it's pretty popular... so why hasn't it shown up yet!! it was the song played in that live footage i'd watched where donovan was on drums, so i wonder if it could be brought in for that segment... might be asking for too much though. this year is the 10 year anniversary of wake, so they might save the hits from that album for an anniversary tour in the fall.

i also checked just in time to see that they're ALREADY releasing brand new music, starting with the single secondary worship. i just gave it a first listen a minute ago and this would have been my easy favorite had it made it onto their last album. they've promised to play it live and it's going to rip so hard. i think they should follow the japanese model and sell CDs of every single little release so i have more collectibles (don't do this i had to tighten my recreational budget).

i also wrote this entry so late that i've already gone to my next concert with closure in moscow...! so i'll leave all the details on that to the next entry.