Spencer Radcliffe and Everyone Else Chuckle

"Because the truth is never easy / Always painful as fuck, fuck, fuck."

Spencer Radcliffe uses his open indie rock songs as a way of searching. You can hear it on songs like "Clocktower," on which he hopes "for some time alone to clear my thoughts and unwind." But it's really throughout his catalog—even in the ambient pieces he's made under another moniker, Blithe Field. There's just a sense that he's always trying to untangle something complex. “It’s sort of an ode to the constant underlying cosmic weirdness of everything and going through the cycles again and again and trying to stay sharp even in the face of guaranteed defeat,” Right now, though, it’s the middle of the afternoon and he’s sitting at a picnic table beneath a collonaded pavilion in Monsignor McGolrick Park across the street. It’s cold and overcast and a group of pigeons are fighting amongst themselves to get into a hole in the wooden ceiling above him. “Most things seem pretty strange to me,” he says after one of many long pauses. “I can’t think of many things that don’t seem strange.” 2017’s Enjoy The Great Outdoors was his debut as Spencer Radcliffe and Everyone Else, where he led a full band that gave his previously solitary songs, like the ones on his his 2015 breakthrough Looking In, a meatier backbone. His newest LP with the band, Hot Spring, which is premiering below, is his most cohesive collection yet. It’s a brightly arranged and meticulously pieced-together 10 song effort that boasts silky pedal steel from new Everyone Else member Pat Lyons. “For the last record, we were figuring out as a new band how to make 10 diverse songs that would sound good together. But this time since we’d been playing together much longer the LP was a more natural product of playing together,” explained Radcliffe. On “Here Comes The Snow,” premiering above, Radcliffe pays such close attention to something ordinary that it becomes strange to the listener as well. "Here comes the snow again,” he murmurs over hovering flutes. “Is it still white? Some things can appear differently under a different light.” The thought pushes him off course: “There's a different darkness, one that I've seen for sure / I've seen it dulling out the brightest things and cutting right to the core,” he sings, and Engstrom’s guitar floats, disturbingly carefree in the background. “They don't shine no more.” It’s enough to make me wonder if Radcliffe is constantly thinking about ruin. “I don’t think so,” he says. “It’s just a general possibility of the existence of life. I try generally to be a realist, although most things tend generally to feel pretty surreal to me.” He laughs at the friction between those ideas. “I just try to be a well-rounded individual.” At the tail end of Hot Spring is “Centaur’s Song,” a rangey country-rock song told from the perspective of a mythical half-horse, half-man who wants to engage in some half-cannibalism. "I think I might boil some cabbage down tonight / With the torso of a human and a horse's appetite," he sings. The record concludes with him offering torso-stew to the town: “I think I should set fire to some wood / Go run and tell the town, there's plenty to go around / Tell the good and the bad ones too, everyone deserves some stew / Even you.” “I find most things pretty funny,” he says with a smile. “Most things are, at the very least, darkly funny.” Seven hours later, he’ll stand up in front of a few dozen people at the church across the street — in front of a bronze Jesus pinned to a five-foot crucifix beneath a flower-shaped stained glass window — and sing the word “fuck” three times in the middle of a heart-stopping acoustic set. Which is, at the very least, darkly funny.