Chasing Fridays: Spirit of the Beehive, Magic America, Seefeel, and more

Hello hello. It's the final Chasing Fridays of 2024. In between dealing with a five alarm shoegaze emergency – which I'll probably write about in some capacity in the coming weeks – I spent the last week playing catch up. My 2024 lists were done and published, so I dug into some blind spots on other people's lists, listened to some things I'd been meaning to peep for months, and also put some serious effort into understanding a record that's stuck in my craw for most of 2024. Check all that out below.

Thanks for reading Chasing Sundays in 2024 – and a special shoutout to everyone who subscribes at the $5/month tier. Doing so allows me to put substantial effort into churning out these weekly posts and also work on occasional longform pieces. I feel privileged to have been able to grow this site tenfold over the last year, and I sincerely appreciate everyone who cares enough about what I have to say to read, subscribe, or even toss me a few bucks each month. There'll be plenty more of what I delivered in 2024 coming atcha in 2025. Onward.

Spirit of the Beehive - You'll Have to Lose Something

I didn't like this record. I tried. I listened to it north of 10 times and it just wasn't hitting. I was frustrated. Spirit of the Beehive were, for a long time, one of my favorite bands. They were one of the first bands that taught me that music could be a give and take. They could unspool the most serene melodies and ecstatic grooves, and then mercilessly snip the thread with abrasive noise or a warped sample that totally interrupted the song's linear momentum. Creating something beautiful brought them the same satisfaction as ruining it. In fact, that yin/yang contrast is the whole conceit of their music – the euphoria/comedown psych-gaze of 2017's Pleasure Suck, the benevolent dream/malevolent nightmare noise-pop of 2018's Hypnic Jerks. Their 2021 album, Entertainment, Death, was mostly nightmarish. Every song had 15 different movements and side-quests, and you really had to scrounge to find the hooks.

Entertainment, Death is one of those albums that I only enjoy hearing every other time I listen to it. Pleasure Suck is the same way. I didn't want another one of those albums from Spirit of the Beehive. I wanted another Hypnic Jerks, a record that was absolutely weird and nonlinear, that ends with the greatest fake-out crescendo I've ever heard, and confines the poppiest song they've ever written to a brisk minute-and-change. The equivalent of trying to fit the entirety of a chicken parm sandwich between two English muffin halves. Overall, though, Hypnic Jerks is a pop record, and I wanted to hear this Beatles-esque band make another freaky-ass pop record, not another overindulgently obtuse art-rock record. Fortunately, I got my wish – it just took me six months to realize it came true.

For a long time, I thought You'll Have to Lose Something was just as difficult as Entertainment, Death. Sure, there were dollops of melody of around the margins, but the gilded majesty of this album was not readily apparent to my ears. It's the type of record that isn't at all conducive to the way I consume most music – "cool, next. Cool, next. Blah, next." Not a lot of, "hmm.... huh?.... hmmm..... wha..... mmmMMMM..... oh! I get it now." I almost gave up on You'll Have to Lose Something before ultimately getting there. Now that I'm there, I realize I indeed had to lose something in order to arrive: I had to shake my passive listening posture and let myself soak in this record. I had to give myself over to it and, like a nice pair of headphones, break it in with repeated listens. I had to let the album itself bleach away my skepticism toward it.

For a long time, exercising this record wasn't a fruitful experience. I think I actually liked it less after my sixth or seventh listen than I did after my first. Then, around the 10th or 11th go-around, when I had developed what I thought was my final take on this body of work, the beauty became visible. Suddenly, all of my perceived problems with You'll Have to Lose Something – that it was overcooked in post-production, that the writing was jumbled, that what they now do in a DAW is less engaging than what they used to do with scuzzy noise-gaze guitars – became its greatest strengths. I don't think this is my favorite Spirit of the Beehive record. It's by no means the most accessible – or the most difficult – Spirit of the Beehive record. It is, however, their most lavish and refined. It feels like the completion of an idea they've been tugging at for years, ever since the band's sound changed dramatically on Hypnic Jerks and they became more of a studio project than a band playing songs.

I could list off all the moments on You'll Have to Lose Something that I like. The vindictive opening lyric of "Sorry Pore Injector: "Pray for a healthy man's death/Hope he never had children/Because your liver is shot". The motorik chug of "I've Been Evil." The syrupy groove of "Duplicate Spotted." The passage in "Found a Body" when the ritzy synth arpeggios arc rainbow-like over Rivka Ravede's glitchy coos. I'll stop there, though. You'll Have to Lose Something is something every Spirit of the Beehive fan needs to experience on their own. If you, like a recent version of me, haven't gotten there with it, don't give up. It's about to be a new year. A time for self-reflection. Goals. Habits to form and/or break. Let this record guide you into a new phase of rejuvenation. Give into it. Lose something. There's so much to gain in doing so.

Mopar Stars - Burning Question

Who's the best power-pop band helmed by hardcore dudes? Young Guv? Dazy? Angel Du$t? Are we counting Glitterer? In 2024, Mopar Stars may have snatched the title. The Philly band feature members of Poison Ruin and Zorn, but unlike the grim ugliness of those bands, Mopar Stars sound like popping open a bottle of Mexican Coca Cola on a sweltering hot summer day. Their EP from this year, Burning Question, is an alluring cross between Cheap Trick pop-rawk and the maudlin cloudiness of Darklands-era Jesus and Mary Chain. ​The opening title-track puts me in a mood to track down a copy of Happy Diving's Electric Soul Unity – truckin' power-pop. "Severed Head" imagines if the Ramones were English, while "Waters Rising" has a when-the-main-riff-comes-back-slower moment that repurposes Mopar Stars' hardcore instincts in a pop context. So, a run of three impossible-to-dislike songs, and then a few extra goodins' on side B. C'mon now.

The Body - The Crying Out of Things

If I spend time with one of every three albums by The Body, then I feel like I'm moving at a good clip. This duo puts out so many records, but this is their first solo LP since 2021's oppressively noxious I've Seen All I Need to See, an album that really encapsulated the rage and hopelessness I was feeling at the height of COVID lockdown. The Crying Out of Things delivers more of their solemn noise-metal dirges, but with a little more sonic levity – more for your ear to grab onto. A serpentine beat in "Removal," mournful horn squeals in "Last Things," a weeping lead lick in "Careless and Worn." Cheery, right? Certainly not, but compared to the gaping hell chasm that was their last LP, The Crying Out of Things is dynamically intricate and, by The Body's standards, songwriterly. I usually reach for the Body's music to power-wash my synapses during times of profound despair. This collection doesn't necessitate a broken spirit to resonate. Half-broken will do just fine.

Seefeel - Everything Squared/Squared Roots

Seefeel had their most productive year in well over a decade, dropping their first album in 13 years, Everything Squared, in August, and then following that with another record, Squared Roots, earlier this month. The extent to which Seefeel were ever a shoegaze band is debatable – and I'd err on the side of, "not really, but kind of" while talking about Quique, and "no" for anything thereafter. However, it feels spiritually correct that the UK band – one of the first to explicitly tie the knot between shoegaze and electronica – would re-emerge during the ongoing renaissances of both shoegaze and dub techno. Best of all, the new material doesn't lag a step behind the quality of the music they were putting out in the second half of the Nineties.

Everything Squared is the more traditional Seefeel album of the two. A song like "Multifolds" is constructed with the same sort of hypnotic synth loops and refracted vocal snippets that the band have spent decades shaping into glassy tidal pools of sound. "Antiskeptic" updates their formula with spritzes of staticky distortion and bass that booms deep in the background like far-off cannon fire. Squared Roots feels less like a different record and more like a fresh perspective on the previous one, like turning your seat 35 degrees to the left and staring out into the same mountain range from a slightly altered vantage point. The synth motifs are a bit smearier, the contours of the songs less defined. It's more texturally rich than Everything Squared yet also less gripping, as it sacrifices some of Seefeel's signature pulse for a more drifting, edgeless compositional structure. I like them both for different reasons, and think they work well digested together in the span of a single course. Seefeel's sound is eternally pleasing.

Magic America - Texting the Dead b/w Andie

I've written before that I want to hear more shoegaze bands working with auto-tune, vocoders, and other vocal processors. "Texting the Dead" is exactly what I'm talking about. The first of two songs on Magic America's debut seven-inch features auto-tune-dusted vocals crooning over a trip-hoppy shoegaze hit. Whereas most Philly shoegaze acts have spent the last half-decade reveling in lo-fi muck, Magic America's sound is exquisitely clean and regal, harnessing the mixing talents of Jeff Zeigler to wring every speck of glitter from each spangly ribbon of guitar. "Texting the Dead," specifically, is operating on a similar wavelength as that band Drook I wrote glowingly about last month. These are rock groups who were clearly gung-ho about hyperpop earlier this decade, and are now finding tasteful ways to incorporate those maximalist electro-pop ideas into guitar-based music.

The B-side, "Andie," is more like a Hovvdy song with a phaser-loaded gush of distorted guitar that pours in halfway through. It's a delightful hook enshrined in a blindingly saccharine arrangement that verges on being too twee for its own good. I still like it, but I worry that this band could lose the plot if they travel too far down that path and succumb to kitschy indie-pop tropes. "Texting the Dead" is damn-good shoegaze sung with the vocal effect version of blue-light lenses. It sounds invigoratingly modern yet also classic, in a way. Like if Chapterhouse had the same equipment available to them to make Whirlpool that The 1975 have access to today. Considering these are Magic America's first two songs, I think it's abundantly obvious that we got a live one here.

Animal Ghosts - Swell

For as tapped in as I am to shoegaze, there's still so much music that totally misses my radar. Animal Ghosts' new album, for instance. The Portland group have dropped five albums since 2020, and Swell, their 2024 release, gives me FOMO for not catching on sooner. This is some fantastically crunchy, properly abrasive noise-pop that reminds me of Astrobrite and a slightly more palatable version of prime-era Medicine. Opener "Wonder" feels like a spiritual successor to MBV's "wonder 2," with a sweat-inducing breakbeat masked by plumes of dissonant feedback. But the majority of Swell is pop-forward and easy to down, occasionally tipping into grunge-gaze power chords without ever threatening to leave the parameters of shoegaze. I'm partial to shoegaze that batters my ears with acidic distortion and splintering drums. Swell serves me what I need.