Indian Jewelry
Invasive Exotics

Monitor Records 2006

By Hunter Stephenson

A band on the rise, Indian Jewelry brandishes disorientation, tension and detachment with such engaging finesse it’s as if they’re performing at the far end of a forgotten mental hallway. Last year’s Invasive Exotics, their first as IJ, has been dozed on, almost naturally, but it has stature as one of the top releases from Monitor Records (Cass McCombs, Battles). Moreover, it’s indelibly atmospheric, more so than anything released this year.

Creatively, especially on tour, these three Houstonites have a pack-o’-rats mentality that calls for artist friends to contribute. The band’s core aesthetic is an odd collage of bucolic Eastern mysticism that oh so slightly mirrors early Doors, urgent psychedelic drones that never fully stone out, dank digital effects and winding vocals that, on separate tracks, echo Pixies, PiL, ‘90s also-rans Salt and the Birthday Party. That calm-storm foundation is batted at by the band’s gypsy MO. making their sound shape-shift with unpredictable verve. And this album is a fucking blast to hear due to the experimentation, and not, as is usually the case, aside from.

“Lesser Snake” introduces the album with foreboding guitar tweaks and tambourine battle rattles, hinting that the song could be an exotic rocker like Black Lips “Hippie Hippie Hurrah.” Instead, woozy male vocals melt and plead over a murderous go-kill-Colonel-Kurtz jamboree for the entire duration. The track turns on the screws without being overtly heavy, and “Powwow” follows with member Erika Thrasher’s dream-stirred rants getting drunkenly cozy with a thick blanket of post-punk static. “Come Closer” is the single, pushing a lovely, shadowy Mazzy Starr-esque falsetto into a locked room to make friends with a submerged synth that’s simply alien, electric tools apt for an informal dentistry, and a perverse omnipresent narrator with a deep, spectral voice. “Lying on the Floor” is a purely recreational funster chockfull of teleportation efx made summery with metallic gunfire snares similar to those on the Flying Lizards’ classic cover of “Money (That’s What I Want).

Far from being the gloomy, upstate art-school project or a loose band of hipsters going passé industrial, Indian Jewelry’s nomadic Lynchian aesthetic is like discovering a new opiate. This is a record made by people who know how to come together, take clever risks with song structure and mood, and chauffeur the brain threw an original, drugged-out maze that seems to fully render only as you turn its harrowing corners.

This discourse of Indian Jewelry's Invasive Exotics is written by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007 .