"The Kid Gorgeous, and the Symphony In The Sky"

^{2nd of October, 2025 by Reliquia}

When you get older, no article of music seems safe from the affect of real life.

People give you music or provide you music or recommend you music, this is my ritual offering for you, this is my shrine to you. Playlists are modern reliquaries of fleeting connection. The last boy I thought I was going to marry gave me Post Elvis, David Bowie, The Go! Team and of Montreal. Given, I knew 50% of those groups before I fell into his lap. Or he fell into mine. But my previous lone connection to those stars were erased by the connection re-established. The music didn't solely belong to me anymore. Everything is now co-parented. I am in a million custody battles with everyone for every band I've ever loved.

Except for Saint Motel, still glimmering in the ether after seven years. Saint Motel are an indie pop outfit that started out making melodramatic garage rock, with the ForPlay EP (2009) and their debut Voyeur (2012) – ForPlay and Voyeur tease sensual ballads, angry love letters to lost friends and lovers and everyone who's wronged you in-between, but Saint Motel only really hit the mainstream, and the desk of my life, with saintmotelevision (2016). The first time I ever listened to Saint Motel was the third song off saintmotelevision, a sexy, fierce odyssey called Destroyer. Like most of A/J Jackson's masterpieces, Destroyer is a ballad about a manic pixie dream girl and a microcosm of Saint Motel's running themes: narcissism, devotion, desire, ambition. And as a 14 year old who thought she was falling off the edge of suburbia I was instantly hooked. Digging my filthy hands into the whole album and everything else A/J Jackson, Aaron Sharp and the rest of Motel had created, ForPlay and Voyeur arrived to me like beautiful mirages. And spoke to me. And every time I reach back for them, or saintmotelevision, or the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, they still shimmer. Like I haven't aged, started college, had relationships, bleached my hair, learned who I was. Still learning. Saint Motel have stayed pristine. A relic out of time. Sitting in the theatre of my life, with their heels kicked up.

I have various thesises for why this is. My obsession with Saint Motel has lasted so long that I regularly go periods of time without diving into their work again, and accordingly they get buried under the pile of artists I also get crazy-obsessed-with. Dr. Dog, Surf Curse, Best Coast, etc.. but with all of those other artists, those have been stolen. They no longer ‘belong' to me. And Saint Motel has stayed. I guess maybe it's a right-time thing. That I wasn't crazy-obsessed-again during a bad-time. Or maybe Saint Motel are encased in such thick nostalgia for the beginning of my adolescence that no matter what happens in the present, no matter how my morale is eroded and flipped and switched and spread out under-neath me like a deck of cards that keeps turning against me, house-always-wins, this band emerges as the grinning reminder that if you survived that, you can do this.

On the day of the Saint Motel concert, my new film camera arrived. During 2025 I've been really getting into film photography; narcissism, preservation, nostalgia. After he called Paul Thomas Anderson a coin-flip hack for One Battle After Another, a friend I frequently go back and forth on called photography masturbatory when I asked him to bring his girlfriend next time we hung out so I could take a photo of them together. Like I can't even argue with that? I've been only using disposable Kodak cameras during dipping my toe into film but weeks ago I took the plunge and finally invested in a real 35mm film camera, triple digit price, a manual and all. A zoom and numerous buttons you have to study for to use correctly, like finding a magical artifact with a cursed past. I loaded it with Portra 800 film like doing heart surgery, meticulous, painfully aware of the price tag attached to the film I'd bought, and used all 36 exposures over a day and a half inclusive of the time spent at the concert.

Crisp, right? For the reasons I listed above I thought I could show up 20 minutes before doors opened and there wouldn't be a line but there was. I stood half down the block from the Metro. The girl idiot, standing in Sandy Liang pointe flats and thigh-high recital socks like a delicate summercamper in a Sofia Coppola movie. When I finally stumbled in and was awed by the massive chandelier (star of the show before the show), I immediately beelined for the merch queue and started a conversation out of sheer boredom with a young woman behind me who also was going to this concert alone. She kind of stumbled over her words but was visibly enthusiastic, talking about how no one else she knew knew Saint Motel, that she was talking to a pair of Americans who were actually friends with the frontman's mom!, she was hoping and vying for anything from Voyeur like me. I asked her how old she was and she said a number that made me feel old and I stared into her dimpled face and realised sadly, maternally, she reminded me of me: years ago, when I first got into the band, doe-eyed and stumbling. Before the world had opened up to my stupid hands. I left the merch line with a Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD and went for the doors to the actual general admission crowd, and when I looked behind me she had followed me to barricade. I was fine to babysit her but asked her to get home safe because the concert ended at 11pm please, and I took her phone to record for various songs by her request because she was too short and I was in front of her.

Getting to barricade for the Saint Motel concert was obvious. It was not a question or a mission but a prophetic perfect tensed statement. When I shoved in, I profusely apologized: hey, I've been listening to these guys for 7 years, I am so sorry and the woman I was apologizing to smiled and nodded it's fine. After the mid opener Saint Motel had technical difficulties and while everyone was standing around to kill time I glanced at her phone and she was reading patch updates for Claude, a semblance of artificial intelligence. And I said,

RELIQUIA
You're reading patch reports at the Saint Motel concert?

And she said,

WOMAN
Look at the other guy.

Reliquia looks at the other guy. The other guy, to Reliquia's left, is a bored 15 year old who is currently on the calculator app adding 67 over and over brought there by his much more passionate gay brother.

RELIQUIA
Oh.

When A/J and the gang actually came on I started cheesing and didn’t stop cheesing until the show ended. I don’t remember what song but at some point he got down from the stage and sang to barricade, and he high-fived all of us, including me. And it was so weird, making eye contact with this person who’d soundtracked almost all of my teenage years, being in the same room as the whole group. Just a few feet away. The only other time I’ve ever felt like that I think was when I saw Built to Spill in '23 at Manning Bar and me and Doug made eye contact while I was screaming the lyrics to Carry the Zero.

Is he not just effortlessly cool?

"The Kid Gorgeous, and the Symphony In The Sky"

Recommended reading