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One Swell Day

One Swell Day: Eating Pizza with Dominic Angelella

February 29, 2016
  • This graffiti was outside of the venue in Prague. I had never seen screamo-centric graffiti before. Is this a screamo gang? What is EHL street? The upside-down cross is a nice touch as well.
  • Jet lag is weird. This was taken at 5:45 AM outside of a nightmare hostel directly after our Prague show. I was locked in the hostel for a couple hours and paced around frantically, trying in vain to speak to the front desk guy.
  • Bro Bar in Leipzig.
  • En route to Munich, we were stuck in a classic European traffic jam. I remember noticing that the air was very clean and losing a push-up contest with the bassist of The World Is A Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid To Die. Pictured: The illustrious Brandon Beaver.
  • I guess this traffic jam was interesting. This is genius sound-person Mike Lane and wonderful Polish tour manager Krzysztof.
  • After running into some insane border problems getting into Switzerland, we found ourselves in beautiful Lucerne. I got really close to some swans until I was advised otherwise.
  • More Lucerne. Obviously pictures don't do this justice. Being an occasional tourist is very tight.
  • This is in Cologne during an intense mewithoutYou pinball standoff. Aaron Weiss is the best at pinball. I saw him beat this game twice.
  • In Berlin, we had to go to the American Embassy to get a last minute passport for our Russian Visas. This is Michael Weiss and we weren't supposed to take this picture.
  • Mike Weiss again on our ferry trip to Copenhagen. We didn't have our passports (they were at the Russian embassy) and somehow got into Denmark with no problem.
  • I don't really know what was going on here. I asked Brandon Beaver to take a picture of me because our hostel had a weird closet with two beds in it. In retrospect it looks like i'm the weird American guy selling drugs at the hostel.
  • There was a cool sculpture park across the street from our Weisbaden show and this sculpture looks like the Eraserhead baby.
  • Amsterdam was great and I wish I took a better picture to show how great the city is.
  • Ricky and Krzysztof chilling harshly in Belgium. Looks like Krzysztof is counting money.
  • We had a day off in Bruges, the best sleepy old town in Belgium. Spent most of it doing laundry and drinking old beer made by monks.
  • Artsy window-pic of said laundromat.
  • The UK had all of these little rest-stops by the sea full of old buildings and picturesque views. If you go inside the structure to my left there's a broken old speaker that spews nonsense. It felt like we were in Lost.
  • Steven of TWIABP getting hyped about our London gig. The stage was high.
  • Krzysztof and I went looking for a record store in Bristol and were having a hard time. I ended up buying a bunch of dub 7
  • On a further quest for records, we walked down this side street in Birmingham and came across this sculpture. Right down the street there was a cafe that gave us an insane amount of free food, including jambalaya that was comparable to New Orleans.
  • This door was the entrance to our second Russia show in the small city of Murmansk. It was so exciting to be there, in this converted auto garage, performing for 150 excited Russian teenagers. At the end of the gig, we were detained by Russian immigration and it was very scary.
  • This is the first slice of pizza I had on the tour, in the airport in Milan. We were running on zero sleep, having been detained and then rushing to the airport, barely making our flight out of Moscow. Ricky and I found a pizza place that was open at 10 AM and ate like kings.

Dominic Angelella is DRGN King, 1/2 of Lithuania, and a fan of pizza. In the Philadelphia music scene and beyond, it would be hard to find someone more creatively active and supportive of his fellow music community members than Dom. Consistently finding new ways to make beautiful music, he can hold his own in performing, discussing, and being a hardcore fan of a wide range of genres.

It’s no surprise that when we asked him if he’d like to make a pizza playlist, he took it to the next level: Europe. Filling in on bass for Philly experimental rockers and top-notch performers mewithoutYou‘s tour of Europe, Dom captured the journey on film, in sound, and … with pizza. The veritable pizza Jesus (see his song “Holy Ghost“) even captioned every picture of his adventure and compiled an impressively varied playlist that includes brand new tracks and obscure deep cuts. He had the following to say:

Ok here we go…so in late January, I flew over to Europe with mewithoutYou. I was asked to fill in as the Euro-Tour-Bassist. We rehearsed for a few months and then all hopped on a plane to Prague. Having never been to Europe before, I was reasonably stoked. Here’s some pictures and some songs I was listening to on the trip.

See Dom play solo material live at Everybody Hits on Sunday March 6th with Sons of an Illustrious Father, Jackie Paper, and Horsecops.

More Dominic Angelella: Twitter | DRGN KING | Lithuania  

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