Breathing New Life Into Shoegaze, An Interview with Clearbody
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Even though it came out in December, Clearbody’s One More Day was easily one of 2020’s strongest debuts. Formerly known as Dollhands, the Charlotte, North Carolina trio fuse the speed and ferocity of punk with the lush textures of shoegaze to create an immensely satisfying album. Clearbody find themselves in the increasingly fertile sect of shoegaze that is heavily indebted to bands such as Hum and Deftones. Where bands like Narrow Head decide to infuse their blend of heavy shoegaze with the grungy sound of nineties alt-rock, Clearbody’s punk and emo leanings help to set them apart from the pack as they have more in common with Blink-182 than Alice In Chains.
One More Day is a shock to the system; its eight songs are delivered with both speed and efficiency in just twenty-five minutes. “Scratch The Color” opens the album at a sprint’s pace as guitar, bass, and drums charge forward in unison while Eric Smeal sings of the absence of friendship. The band displays its pop sensibilities on “Blossom” and “Too Far Gone,” which feature infectious guitar leads backed by upbeat rhythms.
If this is starting to sound like Clearbody is a run of the mill pop-punk band, rest assured, this band contains multitudes thanks to their bonafide shoegaze aesthetic. The title track opens with heavily reverbed guitar chords, steady distorted bass, and crashing cymbals as gloomy vocals ponder the pain of not being with their beloved. “Suspension” closes the album with a climax that displays how well the band members play off of each other as rhythm section Martin Hacker-Mullen and Seth Wesner provide grit and heft for Eric Smeal’s screeching guitar solo.
What makes One More Day so exciting and interesting is that no song is just one thing despite the short running times. The band is able to include a diverse range of their influences in each track without creating a muddy mess. Pop minded songs such as “Scratch The Color” and “Blossom” each close out with passages of heavy distortion that play into the dreamy side of shoegaze, whereas “One More Day” alternates between moments of slow haze and blistering aggression as a means of servicing the pain and confusion depicted in the lyrics.
With One More Day, Clearbody has delivered a debut that could easily be from a band that has found its sound three or four albums into its career. Who knows where they will go from here, but wherever it is, I will follow.
Recently, I had the pleasure to sit down with Eric Smeal, Clearbody’s guitarist and lead vocalist to discuss the band’s past, present, future, and you guessed it, Tom Petty.
The three of you were originally in a band known as Dollhands. Is Clearbody just a name change, or do you view it as a new band removed from your old work?
Kind of both, honestly. Technically the original band was called Muffled, I started that project by myself in 2014 when I was a junior in high school, it was just garage rock kinda stuff inspired by bands like the Pixies and Ty Segall. We switched it to Dollhands once we started playing local shows because the word muffled is kind of an onomatopoeia; every time I’d say the name to someone, they’d be like, “wait what? I didn’t catch that.” We came up with Dollhands off of word association, and I never really felt like it was a good fit for us, it sounded like a horrorcore band name or something. When Seth and Marty joined in 2018, it felt like a totally new band, we just played some of the same songs.
Your work as Dollhands skews more toward emo and pop-punk. I’m curious what led to the inclusion of aspects of shoegaze. Was this a conscious shift in sound or something that happened naturally?
It happened naturally, at least that’s how I think it happened. Dollhands had a scrapped EP (which I put out earlier in 2020 under the name Collection) that was more so a garage rock record than anything else, I’ve always said that we’re one thing when we’ve been called something else the whole time. I honestly think the shoegaze shit started with the song “Showbiz” off of that EP, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing at the time, but I listened to that song recently and was like, “damn, this is kind of a shoegaze song.” I like to think that we’re a “shoegaze” band, but people can call us whatever they want. When we were writing & recording One More Day, I didn’t realize how much it sounds like a classic emo record, but now I totally see why people say we’re an emo band. I really didn’t get the Sunny Day Real Estate comparisons at first, I just thought they were sick comparisons, but I like that people think of us as a melting pot band.
A version of “Quarterback” appears on a Dollhands/Stress Fractures split EP. Are the other songs on the album B.C. (Before Clearbody), or were they written specifically for One More Day?
So technically, 5 out of the 8 songs are “Dollhands” songs; “Blossom,” “One More Day,” and “In Latency” were all written while we were recording. Seth came to practice one day in April with the Blossom riff, and it just kinda wrote itself. We tracked that song first, and initially it was just going to be a single, but then we were like fuck it, let’s record the rest of these songs, which were “Scratch,” “Ultraclarity,” “Too Far Gone,” and “Suspension.” At the end of 2019, we tracked an EP, which was all of those songs minus “Suspension.” We had another song on it called “Dream Eater,” which was an incredibly cursed song for us to play live; we played it like 8 times since 2018, and every time something would go wrong, or we’d fuck it up, one time we straight up just stopped playing it and moved on hahahaha. We all felt down on our performances during the EP recording session and decided to do it ourselves. Alex Martin convinced us to add “Quarterback” to the record, and we were already working on One More Day, so we added that one too. “In Latency” just kinda came to me one night after tracking, and it felt like a good transition from “Too Far Gone” to “Suspension.” I’ve always loved artists like Grouper and Alex G, so it’s me just trying to channel that energy.
One of the things that impresses me most about the album is how you blend punk’s speed and aggression with the spacey and dreamy aspects of shoegaze without sounding awkward or muddied. Can you speak to how you find this balance?
We just kinda do our thing, it’s always been like that. We try to not put so much pressure into stuff like that when we’re writing, we just know where the parts should be. I’ve always been the “play as fast as possible” type of musician, which can be a little challenging when shoegaze music is usually slow and droney. When we were tracking, I was hella into bands like Boris or Yuragi, Japanese shoegaze music is fuckin sick, and they constantly blend different styles together. I showed Marty this band called “………” the other day (yes, their name is just 9 periods), and they’re straight up a pop-punk shoegaze band, its so fucking sick hahahahaha.
The field of “heavy shoegaze” acts has become increasingly fertile over the past few years, with bands like Cloakroom, Greet Death, Narrow Head, and Nothing all approaching the sound from different angles. Do you see yourself as a part of this movement? If so, do you draw inspiration from any of these bands (mentioned or otherwise)?
I think we’re apart of that movement, yeah. We’ve been lucky enough to play with both Narrow Head and Nothing, along with some other cool bands like Fake Eyes & Soul Blind too. Everyone has their own style to the genre, which is really sick. I think that I draw a ton of influence from both Greet Death and Cloakroom, respectively. I just want Clearbody to be heavy as shit, but also have huge and beautiful moments too. Spirit of the Beehive is the best example of something like that, I think, they can be so aggressive, but they also have these expansive, beautiful moments too. Dynamics in shoegaze are everything to me, they can really make or break a band.
Will you describe your writing process? Do you all write together? Are ideas fleshed out through jamming or some other method?
Most of the time, one of us will just bring a riff to practice, and we’ll try to flesh it out as much as we can. I wrote most of the songs on One More Day by myself first, then I brought them to practice. I write all of the lyrics too.
Your lyrics speak on themes of failed friendship, the passing of time, and people either being lost in life or moved on from completely. Where do you draw your inspiration for lyrics?
Personal experiences, I guess, sometimes it can be hard to tell. My whole life, I’ve always just let the words come out; I’ve never tried to write about only one thing, so all of the songs on One More Day are about a bunch of different things. The title track is mostly about my partner Cass and how they live 12 hours away from me, but it’s also about seeing how much you’ve grown personally. That’s another thing that kind of “happened by accident,” all the songs are about growth. Yeah, sure, you can cover a lot of ground with just vague shit like that, but I think that I processed stuff on this record, shit I needed to move on from. We live in dark times, so I’m glad that the album has connected with people in that way.
Your work as Dollhands features covers from myriad different artists, but the one that sticks out to me as the most interesting/peculiar is your cover of Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” I find it to be a very successful cover and I am curious what your relationship to his music is. I have noticed that, like Petty, your songs are able to get to the chorus/refrain in four lines or less.
That cover was actually apart of a cover comp I worked on! My dad plays harmonica on it hahahaha, but yeah, I’ve always loved Tom Petty, and when he passed away, we started working on that comp, it was way before all the Acrobat Unstable stuff. I’ve never really thought about it like that; I was raised on Tom Petty and other bands like Aerosmith and REO Speedwagon, then when I was in middle school, I found out about Nirvana and blink-182. Blink was obviously the big one; I bought a bass when I was in high school and learned all their records.
You recently played a fantastic live stream for Audiotree. How did it feel to play your music in a live setting with shows being prohibited for the foreseeable future?
It was honestly crazy, we added something new to every song in that set, and I’m stoked with how it came out. Hopefully, we’ll be able to play live in the near future whenever it’s safe, I really miss it.
You mentioned on Twitter that you already have three songs for your second LP. Can you discuss the direction you are going with it and when you think it might be out?
It’ll probably be out in 2022. The songs really aren’t much just yet; Marty and Seth both wrote a song together, which is sick. I wrote a cowboy ass riff for it that I hated at first, but now I love it. I already have a concept for lyrics and imagery that I wanna run with, we just haven’t really had a chance to sit down and talk about that stuff yet. We’re just trying to pump these songs out cause One More Day took me 4~ years to write; the oldest song on it is “Suspension,” which I wrote back in the Muffled days (full circle interview moment) but this one we’ll hopefully be done writing sometime in 2021.
Connor lives in San Francisco with his partner and their cat, Toni. Connor has an MFA in creative writing and is working toward becoming a community college professor. When he isn’t listening to music or writing about killer riffs, Connor is obsessing over coffee and sandwiches.
