Chasing Fridays: Slide Away NYC recap, nasty hardcore, Bellows Q&A

I had an insanely busy week (by my standards) and the next two are going to be even busier. That's because I'm in the middle of my Slide Away tour, where I'm attending all six nights of the annual shoegaze festival in NYC, Chicago, and L.A. Last weekend I was in Brooklyn interviewing bands, Hum fans, and many other shoegaze-curious zoomers for a silly video series I'm doing in collaboration with Slide Away. You can view the Reels-ification of Chasing Sundays over on Instagram, and let me know if you think I should continue making video content after this inaugural experiment. I actually am finding the process more fun than I anticipated, but also stressful in a way writing never is for me. It's good to try new things, of course.

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I also wrote a lot of words this week for today's Chasing Fridays. I shared a bunch of thoughts on what I saw at Slide Away, reviewed some new (and old-ish) hardcore releases I've been listening to repeatedly, and then conducted a thorough and immensely interesting Q&A with Oliver Kalb of Bellows, the long-running indie-rock band who are preparing to drop a new double-album called "Que Bello!" I've interviewed Kalb before and he's always a super insightful and self-aware subject, so I truly hope that you all appreciate what he had to say about his band, the industry, the way Brooklyn indie culture has changed, and more in the below Q&A.

Slide Away NYC recap: 5/15 and 5/16

Although I'm not covering the festival in a strictly journalistic capacity like I did the previous two years, I still managed to see almost every band over the weekend, and I figured I'd share my honest thoughts on what I witnessed. On both nights, the best sets of the evening went to Nothing and Chapterhouse. I've made it very clear that I'm a huge Nothing diehard, as they were my entry point into shoegaze and remain one of my favorite bands in the genre. I love most of their records dearly, but their live show has historically been hit or miss. This year, they were absolutely on the money while playing through most of the songs from 2016's Tired of Tomorrow, which is probably my second favorite Nothing record.

The group re-enlisted OG drummer Kyle Kimball and former bassist Nick Bassett (Whirr) to honor their Tired of Tomorrow-era lineup, and there's just a certain chemistry among those guys that's really special. The songs sounded both powerful and delicate, frontman Nicky Palermo sang on key, and I was reminded both nights that tracks like "Vertigo Flowers," "Curse of the Sun," and "Eaten By Worms" will never lose their luster. The only band who, in my opinion, gave them a run for their money were Chapterhouse. The English shoegaze pioneers hadn't played the U.S. since 2010, and they're 35 years out from the recording of their immortal debut, Whirlpool. However, they didn't sound like they'd aged a day since that record dropped.

The guitars and the drumming were perfectly locked-in, which is great but not particularly difficult for a veteran indie band to accomplish with a few days of rehearsals. What really amazed me were the vocal harmonies between Andy Sherriff and Stephen Patman, which sounded identical to the cherubic falsettos they delivered in the studio all those years earlier. The Whirlpool songs basically sounded exactly like the recordings, and hearing the way those tracks float out of the monitors – just like they do on my home stereo – gave me butterflies. It would've been cool just to see Chapterhouse even if their set was a little shoddy, but I can't emphasize enough how impressed I was with their performances.

Otherwise, the other two sets I most enjoyed were Bleary Eyed and warmachine. The Philly band dropped one of my favorite shoegaze albums of last year, Easy, and unlike a lot of modern 'gaze bands whose lo-fi sound doesn't necessarily translate in a giant room, Bleary Eyed's thunderous guitars and ebullient melodies soared through the palace-like Brooklyn Paramount. I think they're one of the best active groups in the genre, and I was stoked that everyone I talked to who saw them seemed to really enjoy their set. warmachine were the other "breakout band" of the weekend. The Boston group played a gnarly, noisy set of songs that expanded and contracted in surprising ways, and at one point singer Lex Pappas' microphone stand took a tumble, which only made the performance cooler and more unpredictable.

I'll get into Lovesliescrushing after I see them again in Chicago, and maybe by next week I'll have some praise to heap upon Hum. They were far and away the biggest draw of the weekend, and it was staggering to see how excited their zoomer-centric fanbase was to hear whatever they played live. Instrumentally, the band sounded torrentially powerful. I just don't care about their songs, have never liked the vocals, and couldn't muster the enthusiasm to be won over live. They were fine. I'm glad so many people I know got to check them off their bucket list, but I think they're one of the most overrated bands in this milieu, even if their influence continues to grow. So it goes. Maybe next week I'll return to this blog a Hum disciple. But probably not.

Some hardcore I've been enjoying

I've been jogging a lot lately, which is wild considering how much I historically loathe jogging. What makes it more bearable – enjoyable, even – is listening to some really nasty hardcore while I finger point and mouth the words like a complete moron. Here are a few releases that have been soundtracking those workouts.

Crowquil - Erase the File

Between Killing Me Softly and Crowquill, Leeds has a killer scene of spastic metalcore bands right now. The three songs on Erase the File have all the manic energy of early Converge, the ferocious power of On Broken Wings, and the contemporary style of bands like Sanction and withpaperwings. It seems pretty clear that the "angel statue metalcore" trend led by Balmora and Azshara is waning, and a new wave of faster, skronkier metalcore is coming to the fore. I'm game for it, so long as the bands have mosh parts as hard as Crowquill do.

By My Blood - Self Titled

I wrote about this band last year when they were just a fledgling local act, but now By My Blood are starting to get some shine outside of Western PA. And deservedly so. Their debut EP is a barrage of knuckle-dragging beatdown with a take-no-prisoners swagger that can't be taught, only earned through racking up bodies on the dancefloor. The kids in this band are some of the hardest moshers on their side of the state, and these songs sound like their soundtrack for roundhouse kick practice. Ugly, angry, and dripping with a wild-eyed eagerness to make something that'll resonate beyond the desolate backroads of Erie, PA.

The fury in these songs speak for themselves. The clean choruses suck ass in a way I find endearing, and whoever writes the Southern metal-tinged riffs clearly has an affinity for early Lamb of God – not to mention the Great Southern Trendkill-ass album art. Regardless, this is the most quintessentially "Pennsylvania" sounding hardcore band I've heard in a while. Enemy Mind and Steel Nation are the template, and I really enjoy the way By My Blood blend those two styles – mercilessly violent beatdown and croaky, riffed-out rural-core – into a sound of their own. There's a whole scene of hardbody bands these guys are coming up alongside – Savage Primal Impulse, Last Ride, Hurt You, Life in Vain – but this is the best recorded project any of those guys have laid down.

Pain of Truth - Not Through Blood

No, this record isn't new. It came out in 2023 and I ranked it among my 10 favorite records of that year. Since then, I've seen Pain of Truth a half-a-dozen times and most of those shows have been pretty fun. But I've barely found myself returning to this album with any regularity since the year it dropped. In that time, I'd convinced myself that this record is just fine. That I'd rinsed it so many times that I no longer needed to hear it again, and it would go down as an album that I loved dearly for a very specific moment in history and then moved on from. And then I relistened to it last week– and then again. And then again. And now I'm remembering why this record rules so fucking hard.

I think it's safe to call Not Through Blood one of the decade's best hardcore albums. It's a perfect execution of what it sets out to do, which is to assemble an 11-song block of "stabbed-in-the-back" tirades that miraculously never sound derivative of one another, and in fact only improve as the record chugs along. Basically every relevant hardcore vocalist of the pandemic era is on this record, as well as a few veterans who bring their A-game in order to keep up with the young bucks. The mosh parts in songs like "Pickin' at Scraps" and "Under My Skin" are diabolical, and I'll never get tired of hearing the 200 Stab Wounds guy growl "SLICK MOTHERFUCKER" during his part in "Actin' Up."

This isn't an underground record and Pain of Truth aren't an underrated band. That's what happens when you make albums as good as Not Through Blood.

Chasing Down

Oliver Kalb
of
Bellows

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

When I think about the bands who I consider to be my indie-rock gateways, Bellows is a name that always come to mind. The long-running project of singer-songwriter Oliver Kalb were part of the Brooklyn Epoch/Double Double Whammy scene in the mid-2010s that I worshipped from afar. Florist, Frankie Cosmos, Told Slant – that whole thang. I distinctly remember discovering the singles from Bellows' Fist & Palm while reading Stereogum in the office of my college lifeguarding job, which is a poetic memory considering "the death of blogs" – I.E., the ending of that whole period of indie music and indie media – is a topic Bellows tackles on "Fung Wah Bus," one of the singles from his resplendent new album "Que Bello!"

Bellows has released several albums since Fist & Palm that've taken Kalb's sound in progressively headier and knottier directions. The thoughtfulness and intentionality in his music is something I really admire, and what's great about "Que Bello!" is that it contains the catchiest, most straightforward Bellows tracks since Fist & Palm, while also maintaining the shrewd lyricism and ornate musical arrangements of Kalb's last few records. This band are criminally underrated, and hopefully this new record will change that.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Kalb about his new record's multi-layered theme, the ephemerality of art, his highly considered album covers, the mid-2010s Brooklyn scene, his favorite Why? song, and much more. Read the full interview below – and the 50-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.