by Gianluigi Marsibilio (@GMarsibilio)
The madness of everyday life and a routine full of small elements can be scary, dark, but that can also be exalted in passages of pure simplicity as, "I've been dancing in the dark / I've been running down a dream / I've been running up that hill." That's what Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else’s new album, Hot Spring is all about.
The singer-songwriter plays his cards with a deep authenticity of authorship and puts his creative soul in dialogue with themes such as death, loneliness, and war. Radcliffe's vision, through the delicate sounds of guitar, cello, and effects created by the eccentric pedals, makes us feel in relation to the earth, to the terrestriality. Listening to Hot Spring we emerge as human and worms, because we feel strongly the sense of the environment and our choices, listening to work like this.
Spencer Radcliffe is not a singer-songwriter, he is a serial hunter of objects, situations that represent the misery and nobility of our time. The creative act is at the center of Radcliffe's brave work, which bases its record on lyrics that have an interesting stratification and a series of extremely varied keys to interpretation. There is also room in the album for counter-current songs like "Thick Fog," in which the roar of the cymbals seems to draw just that fog that drops, like rain, during a rainy day in Chicago. I've never actually been to Chicago, but with a series of sounds like that, I think this could be a good description of the fog in Illinois.
Redcliffe's guitar intelligence manages to make every melodic and rhythmic zone built on his instrument work, a pretty clear example is "Walking Back." All these stylistic elements give a sense of absurdity to Radcliffe's lyrics, which unlike the record Enjoy the Great Outdoors, become even more marked because it is lost in a look all the more cosmic and linked to the cycle of the planet and society, the more solitary and overwhelming.
Radcliffe has therefore written a new chapter that is desperately sensible and resting on a sense of loneliness and decadence that becomes, in Hot Spring, the most poetic and sparkling fuse in the singer-songwriter's career.