Chasing Fridays: Magdalena Bay, Verity Den, Spencer Radcliffe Q&A

By the time you're reading this, I'll be in Dublin, Ireland, where I've traveled to see My Bloody Valentine play their first show in eight years to 13,000 people in a sold-out arena. I have nothing else to say about that at this particular moment, but will surely have thoughts on the matter at a later date. As you can imagine, I am immensely stoked. I'm also immensely stoked on this interview I did with The Hellp that ran on Chasing Sundays earlier this week. I feel lucky to have captured a band of their stature in the mood and moment that I did, and I think it's one of the most interesting Q&A's I've published on this site in a long time.

“God will judge me” for indie sleaze: The Hellp seek salvation with ‘Riviera’

Noah Dillon and Chandler Lucy’s music spawned a culture they despise. The L.A. duo’s new album is their attempt to reshape their band’s “perverted” identity.

Chasing SundaysEli Enis

Ideally, I'd like to have enough paid subscribers to where I could dedicate the time each week to publishing one longform Q&A/essay/feature in addition to each Chasing Fridays column. If you like the work I do and would like to help me get to that point, please consider subscribing to Chasing Sundays for $5/month. And feel free to email me with any suggestions or comments about the stuff I cover. I'm always open to reader feedback, and appreciate anyone who takes the time to sit with my work.

Since The Hellp interview was so long, I kept things relatively light for this week's Chasing Fridays. I wrote about a couple new singles from Magdalena Bay and a new album from this band Verity Den. Then, I did a pretty substantial Chasing Down Q&A with the great Spencer Radcliffe, who released his first solo rock record in a decade just last week. Radcliffe, who also writes songs under the name Blithe Field, has made some of my favorite music of all time, and I finally got to ask him some questions that I've been burning to ask for literal years. Hope you enjoy.

Verity Den - wet glass

Verity Den, a trio out of Carrboro, North Carolina, have some serious buzz right now within the millennial shoegaze contingent. This record Wet Glass that they dropped in October is a nice way of approaching Doing a Yo La Tengo Type Band without sounding derivative of the maestros themselves. The foggy instrumental tracks (my favorites) are reminiscent of Bardo Pond and Flying Saucer Attack (or maybe And Then Nothing...-era YLT), but all the songs on here have a post-rock drift that feels expansive, but never epic. The first couple tracks on the record are the peppiest and most straightforward, and then it fully swerves into a more abstract mode that really hits for me. If you like the sootiness of the Kathryn Mohr album from earlier this year, but want songs that patiently stretch and smolder like the early Kranky catalog, then Wet Glass is a must-hear.

Magdalena Bay - "This Is the World (I Made It For You)" / "Nice Day"

Back in 2021, before I had any clue as to how shoegaze would develop over the next couple years, I remember hearing Magdalena Bay's "You Lose!" and thinking, "Hm, this is almost kind of shoegazey." The Mercurial World song remains my favorite Magdalena Bay track, and I think one of the reasons last year's proggier Imaginal Disk never swept me away is because there aren't any songs on it that crunch and crinkle like "You Lose!" For the last month, Magbay have been unloading two-song singles that are building toward a new project called Nice Day: A Collection of Singles, and last week, they dropped a pair that someone on my timeline referred to as "shoegaze." This, I had to hear.

Of the two songs here, "Nice Day" is the shoegaze one. And it is, far more than "You Lose!," an honest-to-god shoegaze song. Blankets of steel-wool guitar, excess puddles of reverb, sauna-like atmosphere. It definitely proves Magbay can make true-blue shoegaze, but offers little else in the way of compelling songwriting. "This Is the World (I Made It For You)," a slinky strut where Mica Tenenbaum chirps a girl-group refrain over a bassline that makes you want to turn your bedroom into American Bandstand, is the far better track. I recently told Nina that the next phase of shoegaze will be a whole wave of shoegaze-ish artists using the genre as a springboard to explore other sounds. That's where the real creativity is coming in the next few years. Songs like "You Lose!" are what I'm waiting to hear more of. Less songs like "Nice Day."

Chasing Down

SPENCER RADCLIFFE
of
Spencer Radcliffe, Blithe Field

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

Spencer Radcliffe surprise-released his first solo rock album in 10 years last week. To people like me, that album, Ohio Vision, is a big deal. Radcliffe came up in the same 2010s bedroom-pop milieu as Alex G, Teen Suicide, Elvis Depressedly, all the Orchid Tapes bands, etc., and then decoupled from that world by the turn of the decade. I remember seeing him open for Pinegrove in a basement in the fall of 2015, shortly after his Run For Cover Records debut, Looking In, had dropped. What a time. His 2017 record, Enjoy the Great Outdoors (made with his Crazy Horse-style associates, & Everyone Else), is one of the most slept-on indie-rock albums of its time, and was definitely a few years ahead of the country/folk/slowcore zeitgeist that we're currently living through.

Outside of his rock-based music, Radcliffe also helms the ambient/electronica project Blithe Field, and that towering discography includes some of my favorite music of all time. I love Blithe Field, but I'm thrilled to hear Radcliffe return to his rootsy indie-rock sound on Ohio Vision, a loquacious assembly of sleepy-eyed folk-rock that lumbers ever-forward with a wobbly, psychedelic gait. The first song, "Shield and Sword," is an absolute marvel where Radcliffe speaks directly to his listeners about where he's been and why he returned. The lyric, "Stare into the future and it’s looking grim / but I still think that life could be good again," really resonates with me, and the rest of the record is hypnotically comforting in the way only his music is.

For this week's Chasing Down, I asked Radcliffe about life outside of music, Ohio, the history (and future) of Blithe Field, the 2010s bedroom-pop scene, and more. Read the full interview below.

You had a really prolific output across all your projects in the 2010s but have slowed down a good bit in the 2020s. What do you do outside of music that's been keeping you busy, and how do you think taking more time between releases has impacted your work? 

I do a lot of construction work – carpentry, masonry, plaster. Buy broken things and try to fix them. Definitely watch TV more than I did in my twenties. At the same time, I feel like I’ve been consistently playing or working on music the whole time. Maybe less disciplined in my approach to releasing it, though. The oldest song on this album (excluding the one from 2014) I was recording demos of within a few months of Hot Spring coming out. I was pretty focused on electronic music for a couple years and did Hymn for Anyone, Grits Kissed.

I also spent a lot of time working on music for my friend Micah Van Hove’s movie Snake Oil Song. I don’t think it’s been fully released yet. I was performing a lot with other people’s bands for a while. I played a lot of shows with some really great Ohio bands- Wished Bone, Dana, Water Witches, Brood X. I think I’ve lost a sense of urgency to stay on a schedule in any sort of professional sense, but it generally feels good. I like living daily life more than trying to hustle as a musician. Some days it weighed heavy on me dragging out this album’s process, but I’m happy with the results. 

On that note, Ohio Vision is your first Spencer Radcliffe record since 2019, and your first solo one in a full decade. I think the album is a lot rangier and rockin' than your previous ones, and it especially feels removed from the "slowcore"/"bedroom pop" stylings of your mid-2010s work. But you tell me: how do you feel your sound has evolved on this batch of songs, and where did you want to take this record? 

I think I did less planning earlier on, 2012-2015. I didn’t approach songs with a blueprint in mind, so much great music was happening and it all felt so close and in real-time. A lot of people I knew one way or another were putting out music that felt really important and in the moment. I wanted to be a part of it and would just make anything I could with my resources at the time, mentally and equipment-wise. Some of my ideas from then I can’t really stand by or would at least do better, but I found myself in the last five years questioning if the music had suffered from being more thoroughly considered.

For Enjoy the Great Outdoors and then Hot Spring, I had a little more equipment and really specific ideas of what I wanted to do. I had a more consistent band than in earlier years and didn’t want to have every live arrangement be a loose adaptation of the recordings. I developed the idea that it would be ideal if the recordings sounded like a band playing and could be translated fairly 1:1.

I still kind of think that somewhat. I was really enamored with Jim O’Rourke’s production and wanted to make some really sonically neutral stuff that was anti loudness wars. Then for Hot Spring I was listening to a lot of Mark Nevers’ productions and trying to figure out how to copy some of those sounds (ultimately totally unattainable, untouchable master of the studio).

Anyway, by the time I was really in the thick of working on these songs I was trying to just not really do that. Trying to access the state of mind where you’re making music in the moment the way that sounds best for the song free of any greater concept. I also wanted to make something relatively loud again as it had been a minute. As always, I wanted to make something that seemed true and not bullshit.