may 17- may 18, 2025

heat makes me think of number girl

the time is 9:19 PM, temperature 80 degrees fahrenheit, the current season is spring. the conditions are ripening alas for the ideal circumstances in which you are supposed to enjoy my favorite band, number girl.

coddled in these chambers which we refer to as my room, fireworks from the city fair are being shot from the park down the street. i can somewhat see them beneath the trees when i look outside of my window. it doesnt feel like a saturday. 2025 would mark the first spring since i had moved to virginia of which i didn't go, nor cared for going to our city's spring fair. having just about nothing stimulating to do here, it's the event that most residents tend to anticipate attending all year. there's nothing particularly remarkable about it. typical carnival food, overpriced rides that give the impression that they could exhaust at any given moment, and laughter jumbled with arguments and complaints and crying children and fights and yeah. really fun stuff. anywho, why didn't i go this year? honestly there really isn't any deeper reason behind it, i just didn't feel like it. i dont feel like seeing my classmates. i dont feel like spending money. i dont feel like dressing up. and the fact is, i dont feel like i would have any fun there without getting drunk.

last year and the year before that i went to the fair in my city. i went with friends. with each of them, we weren't that close and we were drinking. when i drink i like to drink a lot. as i further reminisce on these memories, i can almost feel the sensation of how alcohol buzzes like mosquitoes throughout my body. although that very well may be due to my potential nerve damage haha. mukai's drinking habits sing through number girl, for instance his lyricism and half of their songs titles are relating to alcoholism if not outright including "drunk" in them.

"drunken hearted" from "omoide in my head" lyrics

less explicitly, their music mirrors that warm buzzing feeling you get when you're a little tipsy. just as hisako had once described an earthquaker pedal, number girls sound is as if you're falling out of the sky, in all of the ways which that could imply. their riffs can be aggressive and scratchy like, "manga sick." or in many of their songs, the composition (especially the drums) flow whimsically as if all of their creative inhibitions were wisped away as seen in "delayed brain." every song is furnished with raw emotions. violent desire, sentimentality, sexual frustration, melancholic deja vu, franctic excitement, are just a few of the natural feelings that number girl illustrates in their songs. as rendundant as this metaphor is getting, number girl makes me feel the same way i feel when i get drunk. in honor of which, here i want to write about everything and anything that the band brings to mind, as disorderly and inhibition free to which my thoughts flow through me. however unappealing and repetitive that may be.

the most potent feeling that number girl illicits in me is love. love is a really interesting concept that means varying things to various people. for me, love is an unconditional natural phenomenon where you have a strong affinity and desire to understand and care for whatever the thing is that you're loving. i like my definition it's widely applicable and makes sense to me for all of the things that i love. i love number girl for one. i've been with their music for about 5 or so years now. my affinity for number girl has never diminished throughout these 5 years. there may have been times where i overlistened to them and didn't listen to them as much as i normally do, however that happens when you overindulge in anything. i seek to understand number girl's lyrics despite the language barrier, i love trying to decipher deeper meanings and connect the themes between the songs. mukai likes to overlap the same symbols between songs. a brutal man, frutstration in his blood, a housecat girl, beer and sake, all reoccuring motifs in his lyrics. i love number girl. number girl also makes me think about loving. it makes sense because usually when i get drunk, im very affectionate to those i love and i cant stop telling them how much i love them. their music makes me think about loving a lot. they bring about my love for life. especially when its hot, especially at night, especially when im drunk. the wave of their melodies takes me captive, wisping my head into a sea of my own memories(get it? omoide in my head?). remembering is another big theme throughout number girl. as i listen to one of their outake tracks, "girl in my blood" i'm reminded of when i was a child living in southern california. i think of how i used to stare out the window of my bus on the way home, in disgust of how such a beautiful place could be so cruel. and now i listen to another outtake, "instant radical," i think about a recent memory, where i was in a new city around 2 or so in the morning, not impaired but wishing i was. i was outside, the sky was pitch black and the city was desolate. it was hot, i was sweating. i talked to my friend on the phone that night. i want to learn how to play this song on the drums, this one makes me happier than the other ones.

they dont have any bad tracks or albums, all of them are good. everything number girl has put out is good. they are so good. red is my favorite color. mukai talks about red a lot. it's 12:12 AM now, may 18th, a sunday.

"tuesday girl" from "omoide in my head" lyrics

i had thoughts about doing a real review, but that'd be untrue to number girl and what they mean to me. number girl is raw, what it means to be unfiltered. these scenarios that mukai depicts all share what it means, or a conflict between rawness, as we all are but try to illude each other into thinking otherwise. rawness is truth. which is why to be drunk is to be true. releasing your inhibitions and embracing your unfiltered truth. the state of being drunk is true. there's a character in a scenario that mukai depicts which i relate to, albeit they all are applicable to us all. i especialy relate to sentimental girl's violent joke. the lyrics, to which alex fyffe translated to the best of his abilities, speak for themself. the song is upbeat but has a sort of curious nature to it. it feels repressed like the girl's sentimentality through laughter and drugs. it feels as if the song has more to say, but it never says it. going into the last verse following the kick pedals, where a number girl song would usually have a solo or someting of the sorts, it instead repeats itself. feeling rendundant similar to the sentimental girl's sorrow desire for release within death. "take me away from here". the ending is cruel

the last line could either be that she wants to go out with a killer joke, or if her joking is like that of a killer. either fits yet changes the narrative so i'd say it's however you choose to interpret it

brutal man is another one of my favorite number girl songs. i interperet it as a response to sentimental girl's violent joke. it's more upbeat and vulgar. the lyrics are explicit, as he repeats "i'm a brutal man" throughout the chorus and he slanders sentimentality, stating that it's worthless. the brutal man acknowledges the impermanance of his being and the inevitability of death in spite of his own sentimentality( "きたく used in the last verse means to return home, suggesting that the loose sentimentality is where the speaker lives."). the line, "the scornful laugh of ignorance" demeans her "violent joke". unlike sentimental girl's violent joke, the song is scattered with fills and experimental riffs, diversifying itself throughout the entirety of the song.

May 22, 9:12 AM, a thursday. still thinking about number girl. i'm in love with their documentaries. i should learn japanese.