Indian Jewelry - The Psychedelic Boutique

Nobody knows quite how many of them there are. What's known is that they come from Houston, and for roughly the last five years they've been roaming freely through the dusty streets of Texas, putting on mind-bending shows. Formally it's an ever-expanding collective, but the ones steering the ship are a simple quartet. Multi-instrumentalist and singer Erika Thrasher (the true matriarch of the group) and fellow factotum Tex Kerschen, along with Rodney Rodriguez (drums) and Brandon Davis (guitar), are the proprietors of this psychedelic boutique, where anyone can come and go as they please, helping to beef up the sound, perhaps with some homemade instrument or other oddity. Over the years this ensemble has thrown itself into all sorts of musical projects (Swarm Of Angels, Turquoise Diamonds, Japanix, Corpes Of Waco, Perpetual War Party Band, NTX+Electric), enlisting a rotating cast of thoroughly eccentric characters met while roaming the States in a kind of good-humored beat trippin'.

The sound of this ramshackle caravan, however, has always kept one common thread: an acidic fruit salad of clear psychedelic lineage, in which drones, loops, drum machines, reverb, guitars, keyboards and assorted noise coalesce into sticky clumps of sound, charged with an almost garage-rock aggression. Even while rejecting the traditional song format, the band reveals an unexpected melodic flair and flashes of clarity, managing to sketch out geometric lines within this mass of sonic offal.

Girl gang and wild beasts

The Houston crew's first appearance comes on a 7" under the name Swarm Of Angels, titled "Plessure". A shard soaked in sulfurous acid that immediately captivates the tiny Girlgang Records, destined to become the outfit's first home label.

Deep in the bowels of the American underground, a creature takes shape that is perpetually mutating and goes by a shifting array of names.

In 2003, on Tigerbeat, under the name NTX + Electric, out comes the album We Are The Wild Beast, a compendium of this embryonic phase of the project, destined to resurface five years later in the Indian Jewelry catalogue. It's the most "no wave" chapter of their saga, inspired by a dream (!) of blonde frontwoman Erika Thrasher, and entirely written and recorded by the band in their kitchen at home (!!).

Chaos reigns supreme: the lo-fi aesthetic and murky production make the instruments involved almost indistinguishable. What emerges is a kind of dissonant monolith, rolling menacingly from the demonic march of "Walk Through Fire" (a sort of electro-rock punctuated by a filthy sax) to the ragged basslines of "Fuckface". The whole record is a massive exercise in cross-contamination, unafraid of incestuous collisions like "Emptyhanded", which starts out as Motown-style soul before derailing into a swamp of electronic noise, or the claustrophobic "Barbwire", which drags Massive Attack into a radioactive junkyard. The noise-apocalypse reaches almost "orchestral" heights on "Poison The Choir", intoned by Kerschen in a subdued register, and "Amateur Video", where the schizoid vocals are torn apart by a guitar that first swerves out of control, then takes over the track entirely, closing with an almost-solo strangled in reverb; while "Cutthroat", menacing from its title alone, sounds almost gothic in its gloomy, metallic trudge.

Amid all this desolation, a few scattered melodic openings slip through (the innocent chorus of the title track), more squared-off structures (the roaring guitar work of "Horrendous Habits") and semi-virtuosic instrumental flourishes (the sax flares of "Looking At You"). But the only moment of respite (so to speak) comes courtesy of "S-O-S-O-S", with its thirteen minutes of catatonic ambient-noise.

The collective keeps feeding its underground legend with a string of unsettling performances and keeps churning out singles, under the names Swarm Of Angels and NTX, until 2005, when it rebrands itself as Indian Jewelry, using a split single with Sugarbeats as the pretext.

"Indian Jewelry", based in both Houston and Humboldt Park (Chicago), is wrapped in mystery, and it's never quite clear what game they're playing. Their press releases delight in throwing everyone off, stringing together nonsensical lines and billing the band as "the secret no one can reveal".

Girlgang seizes the moment and, that same year, releases Sangles Redux, an anthology of this multifaceted (more or less officially released) output from the 2002-2004 period. It's hard to make sense of things through the incense smoke of the trips emerging from this post-atomic commune. "Going South" comes across as the most immediate (and perhaps most successful) track: a dark dark-wave beat underpins a hysterical spoken delivery pierced by guitar distortion amid a swarm of noise and reverb. But "Chasing Rats Out" also offers a glimpse of the band's future sound: echoes of shamanic vocalizing, para-industrial metallic clangs, waves of rough loops and acidic feedback.

Elsewhere, acidic, battered guitars clatter away ("Flesh Is Floating", "Pain Reliever"), electronic obsessions à la Suicide resurface ("The Same Mistake Man", "Bombing Nightclubs", "Lost My Sight"), and bursts of shoegaze racket flare up ("Titanium"), while Erika Thrasher sinks into a gloom worthy of Joy Division to intone the perverse "Downtown" and the disorienting "When We Dead Awaken".

It's a seductive game, even if at times it shows a bit of wear, indulging in noise for noise's sake ("Warm Boxcutter") or kitsch pantomime ("Pasadena Skies").

2005 is a year of rapid-fire releases for the Texan outfit, who put out the 7" In Love With Loving (featuring the fine title track, an alien, menacing mantra accompanied by a video straight out of "Day After"), the EP Rattling Death Train (buoyed by the sickly rockabilly of the title track) and the mini-CD Health And Wellbeing, much of which would later be folded into the following album.

So many releases, often untamed, a testament to a pronounced "expressive urgency", but also to a certain confusion of purpose. Either way, the die is cast: Indian Jewelry are too explosive a mixture not to detonate. And it's their debut album, a year later, that will light the fuse.

The Robot Shamans

Compared to the alien (no-)wave of their early days, Invasive Exotics (Monitor, 2006) leans much harder into the mystical-tribal dimension, staging a kind of "krautedelic apocalypse". A bacchanal that's simultaneously primitive and futurist, within a collective that has turned into an outlandish musical militia: "We are legion" is the motto favored by the combo, which counts at least twenty performers, wrestling with instruments of every kind including "ozark percussion, ghostworm, sequential circuits and pizzazz".

Indian Jewelry are robot shamans, come to renew the acid-freak aesthetic of fellow Houstonians Red Crayola and Butthole Surfers, filtering it through the electronic morbidity of Suicide and the noise-fried highs of bands like Sun City Girls and Gang Gang Dance. The sound grows even more violent and cacophonous, aided by an extremely raw recording that "amateurish" would be too kind a word for.

"It's music that makes your head explode," Kerschen theorizes, quite effectively.

This strobe-lit Texan descent into the underworld begins with the garage pulse of "Lesser Snake", where the dialogue between a bare-bones guitar and a tambourine is marked out by an oppressive bass drum, before being swallowed whole by Thrasher's synth mutterings. Already in the psychedelic flashes of "Powwow", though, you can glimpse the eye of the storm: amid tortured guitars, distorted vocals and dark synth rumbles, Kerschen warns that "what you'll find won't please you". And with "Dirty Hands" the nightmare fully materializes: Kerschen mumbles a Stooges-style mantra smothered by Thrasher's obsessive keyboards, in a black hole of dissonance and tribal percussion.

From here on, everything shatters into a rain of flying shrapnel.

"Come Closer" is a sexy hallucination, its murky pulse and Thrasher's bewitching vocals submerged under drifts of drone and electronic rhythm. But the record's real tour de force is the long "Going South": ten minutes of pure delirium, between drifting house pulsations, echoes of distorted vocalizing, defaced guitars, concrete noise and chilling Suicide-style keyboards. We're close to the alien wastelands of Chrome, but Indian Jewelry's mind turns instead to another mad Texan: "Partying With Jandek" is cryptic and psychotic enough to satisfy the legendary songwriter it's dedicated to.

The exuberant post-punk of "Health And Well-Being", the neon flashes in the darkroom of "Lying On The Floor" and the electronic instrumental "Lost My Sight" (a kind of Suicide-esque piece running on a kraut-rock engine) round out the picture. "Cruel & Cold" is nothing but a flat EEG line, the certification of the end.

Inevitably uneven and fragmentary as it is, the album shows off the full talent of these Houstonians, tireless travelers through the lands of the unconscious, now searching only for a "final synthesis" capable of giving their sound a more cohesive, stable shape. But, once again, that will just be a matter of time.

Always crashing on the same couch

Indian Jewelry have by now carved out a sizable slice of popularity on the underground circuit, rising to prophets of a new "blank generation", no less desolate and iconoclastic than the one that raged at the end of the '70s. Their music is practically impossible to pigeonhole, yet it fits perfectly into that "acid revival" which, between new psychedelic hooligans (Oneida, Dead Meadow, Warlocks, Comets on Fire) and assorted nu-shoegazers (Deerhunter, No Age, Gravenhurst, Brian Jonestown Massacre), is sweeping through the indie galaxy. This too fuels considerable anticipation around the new creature from the Houston brotherhood, which Erika Thrasher & co. exploit (in their own way) by wrapping it in an even thicker shroud of mystery and, as usual, playing to wrong-foot everyone.

On their official website now sits a new, sardonic motto that, paraphrasing Bowie's "Low", reads "Always crashing on the same couch". But there's precious little that's conventional in their world, starting with the look. Indian Jewelry transform into a commando unit of psychedelic revolutionaries. In official photos they pose in keffiyehs and ponchos, brandishing pistols and machine guns, like a kind of Baader-Meinhof in art-house guise. And they accompany the release of their new record with two highly peculiar gadgets: a poster promising a "bloodbath" and the description of another, phantom outfit also called Indian Jewelry, said to have lived in Montauk, New York, in 1970.

Publicity stunt or genuine performance art? Whatever the case, Free Gold! (2008) sweeps away every doubt, finally launching this band of misfits into orbit for good.

It's a journey through space and time under the banner of a transcontinental nihilism, where the horror vacui is warded off by a steady stream of psychedelic hallucinations. Toning down the garage impulse and flirting with shoegazing, Indian Jewelry square the circle of their sound, which keeps gushing out idea after idea while now sounding more mature and cohesive. The wave flame, though pushed into the background, keeps burning, brushing up against the pop nettles of Jesus And Mary Chain, while the psych matrix veers toward certain Kranky-label sonorities (To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie, Valet), albeit with less rhythmic deframmentation of the distortion.

The manifesto of this new direction is the extraordinary opener "Swans", a big bang of drones, feedback and delay that effectively reinvents shoegazing: a dark, spatial version of My Bloody Valentine spins in slow motion with an acidity seemingly diluted by lower voltage, while Kerschen magnetizes the whole context with his aseptic vocal delivery. The schizophrenic frame of "Temporary Famine Ship" twists through a murderous gait, amid industrial sine waves and holograms of Chrome. "Seasonal Economy" is an X-rated new wave nightmare, dulling the senses with its vortex of reverbed voices.

Never so tight and lucid, the Texan psych-rockers can also let loose their melodic soul on an almost "classic" ballad like "Pompeii", embellished by a lovely, almost western-flavored guitar riff, and even give themselves over to the dream-folk of "Everyday", brushed with acoustic guitar, with Thrasher's voice never so sweet and so disorienting at once.

The filthy, deformed shoegaze of “Walking On The Water”, a Native-tinged tribute to Spaceman 3, sits alongside the skeletal remains of Throbbing Gristle, which conceal a wave soul in “Nonethless” (with acidic sax lending it some shine), while Velvet-ish guitars press down under the dome of post-atomic beaches on “Bird Is Broke (Won't Sing)”, a track that's pure amphetamine and always seems on the verge of exploding, only to end up crumpling in on itself. “Hello Africa” is an oppressive drone-blues driven by tribal, robotic percussion, with a relentless base loop, a bare two-note riff, and Slits-like atomized voices lurking in the background.

There's also room for the trance-struck electro-rock of “Too Much Honkytonking” and “Nonetheless”, almost like New Order high on peyote, while through the two short interludes (“Syllabic Viagra”, “Subtle Bodies”) and the instrumental fog of “Overdrive” we reach the journey's final stop. “Seventh Heaven” is the omega, the kosmische passing-over, where an acidic guitar is the last trace of man on earth, departing from Cologne toward what ancient astronomy considered the seventh planet, Saturn.

The journey turns into an alienating, Kubrick-esque odyssey, and the post-ambient psych-core drift looks straight into the eyes of the alpha: kraut-rock.

Not content with the “bang” already certified by several international outlets, that same year Indian Jewelry also pulled Fake And Cheap out of their hat, an outtakes record featuring ten tracks recorded between Los Angeles and Chicago during 2006 and 2007, now exhumed by Deleted Art (the label behind No Age, Mika Miko and These Are Powers).

Further confirming a none-too-hidden passion for dark-wave, the Houston band take part in the double album “Perfect As Cats: A Tribute To The Cure” (2008), a tribute to Robert Smith and co. (featuring, among others, Bat For Lashes, Devastations, Dandy Warhols, Kaki King and Jesu), tackling a cover of “The Walk” that's even more sinister and dark than the original.

Two years of eager anticipation, seasoned with unforgettable live shows across Europe and the States, have only fuelled the seductive allure of the Houston collective. The ever-expanding caravan has finally decided to pitch its tent again, setting up its third banquet on unexpectedly more sulfurous ground. And so, the paranoid raids of the past now give way to acidic metamorphoses, aiming to build toward a climax of dark-tinged evanescence.

Totaled (2010) is a record inspired from its first new wave echoes on “Oceans”, and confirms the state of grace of what is by now a renowned psychedelic boutique. It's an anesthetic routine of magnetic degenerations mixed with sheer disarray (“Look Alive”), tedious drifts of the unconscious set within a soft, floating electric spiral (“Excessive Moonlight”), voltaic synapses alternating with an anxiolytic bass that pins you down like a madman (“Tono Bungay”), ancestral dirges in the vein of Virgin Prunes (“Touching The Roof Of The Sun”, almost a modern-day “Ulakanakulot”) and psych-rock flows simulated by a groove as drunken as it is perverse in its chronic stubbornness. But it's the perpetually booming synth and an unusual imploded clamour that highlight the most captivating facet of the Indian Jewelry formula (“Never Been Better” and “Parlous Siege And Chapel”).

It's the fledgling label “The Reverberation Appreciation Society” that takes in the collective's seventh record. Listening to the eleven tracks of Peel It, the need to hypnotize the listener through synthetic traps and noise detours remains virtually intact. Thrown into the blender are late-period Sonic Youth (the hypnotic, almost playful dance of the opener “Freak Pride”, the sonic mantra of “Against Nature”) and, in its more frustrated moments, the usual Virgin Prunes. Even though that touch of sheer madness, which never hurts in bands like this, is somewhat missing, the overall result is gripping, unsettling and just the right amount of chilling in its own way. The ethereal drift of “How Long”, literally unthinkable a few years ago, embodies the path just taken. Tex Kerschen is noticeably softer and more self-satisfied in steering the whole affair. Meanwhile Erika Thrasher lingers in the background, focused on synths and guitars, lending her vital contribution to the band in the few moments she takes the mic with her usual narcotic delivery (“Eva Cherie”). “Peel It” thus presents us with shamans who are certainly less possessed, but no less abrasive and, in some ways, no less shadowy.

Contributions by Francesca Marongiu (“Free Gold!”), Giuliano Delli Paoli (“Totaled”)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google