WHATEVER, DAD: ESRT (2001)

Whatever Dad Elaiza Santos 100% Take Home Grade Pending

Lil EDIT: WHATEVER, DAD’s bandcamp has been taken down, but Elaiza’s new material can be found here.

16 pages worth of poetry i can no longer decipher or understand:

tectonic plates grow at the same rate as my fingernails,
but i couldn’t scratch a mineral and name it in my hand

all the rocks
and the hills erode, still
the rocks and hills erode
around me to become another kind

but the rock that i know now
don’t know squat about the
thousands of white dwarves, clustering in the sky
o how they cluster in the sky

and i gladly opened up my
test paper to the boy who sat on my right hand side
so that he could confirm
what type of sediment would sink first to the bottom of a body of water

earth science is my
favorite science. how can you
not fall in luv? * * * rocks * * *

WHATEVER, DAD is the solo project from Elaiza Santos of Crying. Everything I found objectionable about Crying (the saccharine chip-tune instrumentation, over-reliance on pop culture references, the abrasive electronic beeps) is shed in WHATEVER, DAD, which allows Elaiza’s voice and tongue-in-cheek lyricism to take precedent in her solo effort.

Her music is rough around the edges, lo-fi recording techniques not allowing (or necessitating) complicated instrumentation. Elaiza’s lyrics are witty and observant, bittersweet contemplations delivered in quaint pop structures and honeyed soprano. “ESRT (2001)” is an earth-science themed musing, that, like many of her songs, allude hazily to highschool notebooks, forgotten memories, inside jokes with friends. I posted the lyrics above because that’s what makes her music good: cheeky, vaguely suburban, and unfailingly self-aware.

You can find Elaiza on bandcamp.

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