Neon Indian- Era Extraña

Neon Indian- Era Extraña

(2011, Static Tongues/ Mom+Pop)

Neon Indian: pioneer of 2009/10 phenomenon ‘chillwave’; talented young 23 year old from Texas; man who sellotaped together some random electronic flotsam and jetsam in 2009 and stood back to reveal a completed work called Psychic Chasms that stunned and excited listening hoards in equal measure. Neon Indian’s creator Alan Palomo has been treated kindly by the internet. His music is innovative, bright and colourful; he is also clearly serious about his machines and the way they are used so prominently and consistently in his work, which is I think part of his wide appeal.

For an album title, Era Extrana sounds like it was rejected as a wacky Coldplay concept name. Mixed by the guy who recorded Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker and both MGMT records, it picks up where Psychic Chasms left off. Fizzling with synthetic spark, beats and video game samples, it delves back in to the fun but delicate papier-mâché universe that Psychic Chasms created for itself to indulge in spaceship dreams and psychedelic story-telling.

Best start with the equivalent of the debut’s hit ‘Deadbeat Summer’ and look at ‘Polish Girl’: overall an incredible poppy stunner to rival Deadbeat’s breezy underplayed emotion and playful energy. There’s no doubt this will be a favourite for Neon Indian sets. The video is also representative of what it seems Palomo wanted to achieve: that eccentric Flaming Lips-esque abstraction. A world that wilfully will not be placed in space or time. Posing like the opening video for a Daft Punk gig, a futuristic astronaut-cum-welder DJ is teased away from his twiddly noise boxes by a young woman and goes on a journey to re-connect with her using what seems to be VHS, or Betamax, or some quasi-vintage equipment cobbled together in the year 2050 because all technology is sort of wiped out but we’ve invented this weird hybrid breed. It’s kitsch and textured. Computers rule in Palomo’s world, even in his videos.

The album is divided into three parts: ‘Attack’, ‘Decay’ and ‘Release’ but some bits struggle to find their voice. ‘Blindside Kiss’ (from ‘Attack’, it seems) tries this kind of detached, drug-infused drudgery that just seems a little aloof for my taste and sort of floats off into space. ‘Future Sick’ (mmm, lovely name) and ‘Suns Irrupt’ follow it into the dark-matter abyss. Feedback and hiss on this album threaten to stop Palomo in mid-song at every turn, even though many of them are strong, and drag him into the vacant dreaminess of his artistic universe. His feel for a good melody is in attendance on ‘Hex Girlfriend’ with its catchy backing vocal and ‘Heart: Decay’ is a classic 1980s Sci-Fi throwback, steeped in muffled effects. Indian acquired his chillwave credentials from the dimension of nostalgia that underlines his oddly apathetic party music, and that is clearly not lost. ‘Halogen (I Could Be A Shadow)’s indie pop structure and danceable tendencies are wrapped by echoic effects added to the vocal and the gentle thrum of high-end hiss.

The detachment of the latter half of the album is arguably annoying. It’s the result of Neon Indian’s insistence on delivering woozy futurism very persistently and deliberately. But you can’t begrudge him for that. The electronic, future….mash concept is clearly strong and sounds like Lucky Charms marshmallows might do if they scrapped cereal and did music instead. Sometimes that can be a little too riddled with synthesisers but the good bits make it worth it, (much like Lucky Charms themselves!) Luck Charms and Neon Indian are surely a marketing tie-in made in heaven when you think about it.

What Palomo does for his third album will really be interesting (not to diminish the obviously considerable effort he must have put in to making this one.) I guess when you’ve made an album as mad as this, what do you do next?!

The album is out now so you can buy it, or you can wait till 10th October for one of these deluxe synthesiser bundles that Rough Trade are doing. Up to you really, innit?