Hello, everyone! Welcome to the first entry of our Dual Destruction Tour blog.
The tentative plan is to trade off between band members on these blog-writing duties, so the same person doesn't have to bear all the responsibility, and also so that our readers will have a chance to get differing perspectives and writing styles surrounding the tour.
We'll do our best to weave compelling and grandiose tales of victory in the face of certain defeat, but some days on the tour are probably just going to be pretty boring, since so much time is spent traveling and waiting! I'm writing this from I-5, somewhere south of Portland, en route to the Ninkasi brewery, which is one of our many favorites from the Pacific Northwest.
As much as possible on this tour we're going to try to sample some good brews and visit some cool spots between shows, because we all definitely appreciate craft beer, and it's really hard to pass up an opportunity to visit an out-of-state brewery that we already know and love. I would say that IPAs are probably our collective favorite, but stouts rank pretty high on our list too.
Actually, I just decided that we'll try to as many post random beer reviews and photos to our blog as possible, in between "real updates," since that just sounds fun and other metalheads tend to like beer too. If anyone has any good breweries to suggest that lie in the path of our tour routing, please let us know! Beer! Yes, we like it.
So, the tour is finally upon us. We've played three dates of 15 so far — Tacoma, Washington, Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. We also played a warm-up show in Centralia, Washington, first, which was our first show in over a year, and it's good we picked a smaller town to do it in since our programmed lighting show (recently expanded) had some bugs to work out, and it was helpful to have an extra show to play to get back into the groove of playing live.
It definitely takes a few shows in a row to really start feeling natural onstage, to get to the point where both the playing and the stage presence work together without having to consciously think too much about it. Seattle has certainly been the highlight so far, being our hometown CD release show for Throes of Absolution (also our first hometown show in probably a year and a half), and also being able to share the stage with our friends in some cool local bands: IDOLS, Spare Me Poseidon and Numbers.
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It was a pretty wide range of music represented, but still a lot of crossover between scenes, and the crowd was enthusiastic all night. Also, we made sure the openers all got paid fairly and proportionately for the effort they put in selling pre-sales, which is something that I can say from my own experience doesn't always happen!
Also gotta give a shout-out to Stealing Axion, our tour mates who have been solid every night so far. The tour has been a little bit tougher on them so far financially since they don't have CDs to sell, so if you're planning to come catch a show, pick up one of their shirts!
