Haunted Summer plays at Peeve’s Public House in Fresno and at Visalia’s Cellar Door

John Seasons and Bridgette Eliza Moody are still getting used to the attention.

“We’ve only been a band for a year and a half,” says Seasons, who along with his wife make up the core of Highland Park’s Haunted Summer. “It’s been a blur,” he says.

The electronic-dream-pop band, which cut its teeth doing Animal Collective covers, plays a pair of area show this weekend. It will be in Fresno on Friday, Jan. 9, at Peeve’s Public House and in Visalia on Saturday, Jan. 10, to play the Cellar Door. They will also perform on KMPH’s morning show “Great Day” on Friday.

This might be the last time the pair is our area for a while. The band is finishing a new record and is looking at mostly festival dates and hitting new markets, such as Canada, in 2015.

“The schedule is filling up quickly,” Seasons says.

Translation: See Haunted Summer while you can.

Seasons and Moody play mostly mid-tempo, textual music that is heavy on the guitar effects and synthesized sounds. Moody’s voice is a powerful, emotive tool that plays soft, sweet contrast to the hints of darkness below. It makes for an eerie, soft-at-the-edges psychedelia.

“It’s a psychedelic approach to modern music,” Seasons says. “We like weird sounds.”

Haunted Summer wasn’t even a proper band when they started gaining followers, based on a few “crappy demo tapes.”

They quickly became an in-demand opening act and have played with an eclectic array of artists — from Mexican indie-pop singer Carla Morrison to the choral rock collective The Polyphoic Spree and the San Francisco black metal band Deafheaven.

It happened so quickly, in fact, that the couple were forced to turn down a pair of gigs (shows they would have loved to play that would have been great for the band’s career), because they weren’t prepared to be a live band, Moody says. It was at that moment they had to rethink the seriousness of Haunted Summer.

“It was just bedroom music to us,” Moody says. “We weren’t thinking of putting it out in the universe.”

This story was originally published January 8, 2015 at 1:15 PM with the headline "Haunted Summer plays at Peeve’s Public House in Fresno and at Visalia’s Cellar Door."