Chasing Fridays: Bleary Eyed Q&A, Blood Incantation, Magic America, more

When I wasn't at shows or out with friends this week, I spent most of my free time listening to Lebanese ambient music, reading Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle, and obsessively replaying the same Enemy Mind song over and over during my latest deep-dive into niche Pittsburgh beatdown. I also wrote about some other music. I ranted about an irritating new noise-rock band, heralded a fledgling Pittsburgh hardcore act, gushed about some shoegaze, and reported from the frontlines of Blood Incantation's summer tour. My Chasing Down Q&A this week is with Bleary Eyed singer Nate Salfi, and it's well worth subscribing to read the full thing. He's an interesting dude with a fascinating musical trajectory.

Chemical - "Subliminal Arrow" / "Eurotrash"

I can already picture the meme: "Friendship ended with Swirlies, now Pussy Galore is my best friend." It's pretty clear to me that noise-rock is the island that many of yesterday's shoegazers are migrating to. Just look at what Her New Knife have been up to, what recent Julia's War affiliates lulled (fka Western Haikus) are fucking with, how forty winks reinforce their 'gazey squalls with steel spikes, and how this new band Chemical seem poised to inherit the "Philly shit" mantle. As much as I love most of those aforementioned bands, I fear we're on the precipice of being inundated with some real irritating bullshit by their less-capable peers.

A trio who formed late last year, Chemical feature members of other Philly bands like Halloween and Lust Orchid, both of whom have intriguing yet thoroughly uneven discographies. I saw Chemical play under a bridge in Pittsburgh last month, before they had any music out, and I thought they were interminable. The singer, a handsomely skeletal figure donning a translucent beater and a ridiculous hime haircut, sang every line with the same monotonous whisper-moan, and the instrumentation was about as topographically varied as a Midwestern highway.

Their debut recordings, "Subliminal Arrows" and "Eurotrash," offer more abrasive atmosphere and clangy musicianship than their live show did. The latter song is the better of the two, weaving a slippery synth into the clamor and locking into a groove that I can actually nod my head to. But at the same time, this reeks of cool-kid bullshit to me. I get it: listening to Model/Actriz and watching Evol-era Sonic Youth live footage makes you feel superior to your frenemies posting grungegaze on their IG stories. But no amount of chic, web 2.0 imagery is going to convince me that this type of tuneless naval-gazing is any less disposable than the average Fleshwater clone. If you're looking to exit shoegaze, just skip ahead to your Disco Inferno/Bark Psychosis phase. Or at the very least, brush up on your Killdozer.

Savage Primal Impulse - Demo 2025

For as harsh as I'm willing to be about any band in these gilded pages, I'm equally committed to revealing when my tune has changed. Pittsburgh's Savage Primal Impulse are the beatdown brainchild of Power of Fear (Daze Records) guitarist Patrick Phelps,​ who's enlisted a slate of fresh-faced pit regulars to fill out the lineup of this new scene staple. I hated this demo when I first heard it back in April (mostly because of the strained vocals and scratchy production quality) and I recently saw them play a show that was so embarrassingly sloppy that I physically shook my head as I walked out of the room. At a mini-fest in Pittsburgh last week, however, they were locked the fuck in, and everything this band are doing clicked into place for me. Now I'm a believer.

My buddy Michael Madman (whose new Rebirth-approved demo is a surefire DOTY candidate) noted the Candiria weirdness of the dance parts in these songs, ​which chug at unconventional rhythms and utilize ample empty space to articulate the antediluvian pulse that's core to all great beatdown. Just listen to the mosh part in "Through and Through": the way Phelps seethes, "FUCK...YOU" in the split-second off-beats between the hammering guitar strokes. How the chugged riff arpeggiates over that constant cymbal smack. The breathless pause before the carnage continues – and how they choose not to bring the riff back slower (as would be expected), but to maintain its taut pendulum swing, thus sinking their teeth deeper into your flesh and leaving you lightheaded from the drawn blood.

I long for a day when Stereogum's Tom Breihan and I aren't the only "general interest" ​critics geeking over music like this. Just how people rightly identify the genius subtleties and complex flavors in narcotized, nihilistic trap music, there's so much galaxy-brained smartness glimmering beneath the surface of​ beatdown hardcore that's this thuggishly stupid. I have (and will continue to) extol the virtues of this shit in the live setting for as long as my fingers have a keyboard to lay on, but I don't want that to undersell how savagely, primally, impulsively pleasurable a band like this can be in your headphones.

Magic America - "Play the Drums"

A shoegaze song about...drums?? Sort of. Philly's Magic America emerged last year with two delightful singles, "Texting the Dead" and "Andie," the former a luxurious, auto-tuned pop song wrapped in shoegazey tinsel and riding a trip-hop beat. Their ritzy 1975-meets-Chapterhouse sound wooed me by running counter to all the scruffy shoegaze bands filling out the underground, and after seeing their meticulously tight set at Slide Away earlier this year (they might've had the biggest pedal rigs at the whole fest), I knew that whatever Magic America released next was going to be, at the very least, highly considered.

"Play the Drums" is in fact highly considered. It's also great. The lead single from their forthcoming debut album, Get in the Truck, wanders astray from shoegaze and ends up on the same block as Alex G's "Cross the Sea," This Is Lorelei's "Dancing in the Club," Bellows' "Orange Juice," and any other perfect indie-pop song from the last decade that blends electronic croons, organic guitar strums, and plunky pathos. Except singer Evan King really goes for the Matty Healy belt during the final verse in "Play the Drums," supplying Magic America with a tuneful intensity that few of their gazey peers would ever dare to attempt, let alone nail the way Magic America do.

ratstallion - "Pit"/"Eye"

ratstallion are yet another band who came to me via email (bands, reach out – if you're good. My email's in the 'About' section of this website). This Denver group have just four singles to their name, beginning with a pair from earlier this spring that split the difference between scuzzy coldwave and ghastly shoegaze. Those two are fine, but their new songs "Pit" and "Eye" are a lot bolder and weirder. "Pit" opens with a haunting siren's call and gurgling bass that could be mistaken for a Ritualz song, and then it morphs into a shrieking noise-rock assault with black-metal howls and a vein-slitting guitar solo.

"Eye" is the opposite: an ethereal nu-gaze tune that distinguishes itself with eerie, chorus-laden licks and vocals that sound like a phantom child burbling up from the bottom of a well. ratstallion aren't one of those shoegaze bands using macabre imagery because it's trendy. This band are actually a little bit disturbing, and I find their approach really refreshing. Especially because they're making dark, heavy shoegaze-ish music without a trace of nu-metal or Deftones-y runoff in the formula. More of this, please.

Blood Incantation, Krallice live at @ Spirit

On Friday, I saw a bunch of hardcore bands play in the basement of a bar. I felt right at home. On Saturday, I saw two top-tier extreme-metal bands – black-metal adventurists Krallice and tech-death progressives Blood Incantation – play in a sold-out venue. I felt a little bit out of my element. Careful readers of Chasing Sundays may remember that I signaled my enthusiasm for Blood Incantation's newest releases, 2023's Luminescent Bridge EP and 2024's Absolute Elsewhere LP, last fall – with the qualifier that I never cared for the band's prior material. That shouldn't surprise anyone who reads my writings on metal.

The death metal I like best is groovy and savage, whereas Blood Incantation, for as heavy as they can be, are all about shaking up the form's conservative tropes with wigged-out prog configurations. The prog-death lineage they're working within of course goes back decades (Death, Cynic, Obscura, etc.), but Blood Incantation have reinvigorated that sound in a way that speaks to my generation of metalheads. I was intrigued to see that the majority of the crowd at this show were people my age (early 30-somethings), as opposed to the 50-and-ups who turn out for bands like Obituary and Carcass when they play Pittsburgh.

The audience makeup – and the room's polite enthusiasm – clarified that this style of music has been wholeheartedly inherited by younger metalheads, which is cool to see because Blood Incantation don't make music that's easy to digest. This isn't musical background fodder or art that can be broken up into TikTok-able fragments. Blood Incantation songs are long and winding, with extended detours into Pink Floyd-ian prog and Tangerine Dreamy krautrock. The band's schtick is to batter the listener with ferocious tech-death onslaughts, abruptly pare back into an atmospheric calm, and then reignite the storm with an even nastier brew of riff latticework and rhythmic destruction.

Blood Incantation's build-it-up/tear-it-down program began to grow a little tiresome by the conclusion of their front-to-back playthrough of Absolute Elsewhere, but they won my knee-aching ass back with the encore finale, "Obliquity of the Ecliptic," a savagely heavy suite from Luminescent Bridge that had me strutting out into the parking lot doing Beavis and Butthead-style air guitar movements and grunting like an idiot. I don't think Blood Incantation will ever be a band I yearn to sit down and listen to in my living room, but after childishly dismissing their hype in the 2010s and then tepidly coming around in the 2020s, I'm happy to say that I get it now.

Chasing Down

NATE SALFI
of
Bleary Eyed

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

There's an understated reason why My Bloody Valentine are so enduring. It isn't just because of Kevin Shields's soundwave manipulations, their unprecedented volume, or even the band's lore. It's the eternal pop craftsmanship at the heart of their best songs. "When She Sleeps," "Off Your Face," "Soon" – these are brilliant and everlasting because you can whistle along to them. Because the abrasive guitars and gleaming synths and affectionate coos are molded into irregular, irresistible pop songs. Bands have spent decades trying to replicate My Bloody Valentine's exact sculpting techniques, and Bleary Eyed aren't one of them. Instead, the Philly band are using their own generation's guitar tones, synth shades, vocal stylings, and drumming patterns to make their own perfect pop songs.

Bleary Eyed's tremendous new album, Easy, doesn't remind me of MBV because it resembles MBV. Easy evokes the greatest shoegaze band ever in more abstract ways: its exacting sonic palette, its creative blurring of organic and inorganic sounds, its distinctive riff shapes, how essential the whingeing synths are to each song, its constellation of singing styles – some celestially auto-tuned, some aggressively glitched, some plaintively soloed – and, most of all, its staggering, eye-widening, hand-over-gaping mouth like a YouTube thumbnail catchiness. Bleary Eyed are making some of the most expertly devised shoegaze you'll hear this decade, and their greatest strength is how they make such nuanced songwriting go down Easy.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Bleary Eyed singer-songwriter Nate Salfi about underrated Philly bands, his shoegaze Mt. Rushmore, lesser-known Bleary Eyed influences, and much more. I learned a lot about his upbringing in the D.C. punk scene, the emotional catharsis at the heart of Bleary Eyed's music, and other interesting factoids about Salfi's musical background.

Who's the most underrated band/artist in Philly right now? 

Great question! There’s definitely multiple, one being Sandcastle. He’s beloved with Sun Organ and Snoozer folks and makes very small, vulnerable Elliot Smith sounding songs where he pitches his vocals up. Fantastic sound. 

Another band would be Nyxy Nyx. Brian from Nyxy has been around for ages with folks like Alex G citing him as an early influence. He frequently releases music randomly on Bandcamp. He writes beautiful earnest songs that make me envision North Philadelphia where he lives every time I hear them. 

As a member of the Philly shoegaze scene, what's the most annoying way people talk/write about the Philly shoegaze scene? 

I think some writers may have hyped up the scene in Philly where it’s become fairly oversaturated with folks, for better or worse. I’m not particularly upset about how folks write about Philly, I think there’s a few bands Sun Organ, Nyxy Nyx and Snoozer that deserve more coverage or credit for the sound. At the end of the day, I’m thankful for people catching on.