Artist: Neon Indian
Album: Psychic Chasms
Year: 2009
Grade: 2.5 pretzels
As much as I try to keep up with the latest exciting or buzzed-about releases, things do occasionally slip through the cracks or escape my notice. One of these is Neon Indian’s Psychic Chasms, which has been floating around for about a month now. The usual suspects (Pitchfork and the blog community) have lavished this album with praise, so it’s about time I weighed in with my own opinions.
First of all, before you can talk about the album itself, you have to talk about “Deadbeat Summer”, the album’s lead single and all-around calling card. In and of itself, “Deadbeat Summer” is a wonderfully blissed-out little nugget of indie-pop, bouncing and gurgling along without a care in the world. If I heard this song in, say, the middle of July, I’m sure I’d be listening to it about eighty times per day. Now that we’re in the middle of November and I’m greeted by the biting New England wind every time I walk out the door, it’s a bit of a different experience, but the song’s cheerfulness still shines through.
The problem with Psychic Chasms is that it fails to sound like anything more than a brightly-colored vehicle for this one great song. The synthy dance-jam “Terminally Chill” comes the closest to greatness in its own right, but the rest of the album just sounds way too thin and undercooked. There are only about four complete songs here, with the rest of the album dedicated to sonic soundscapes and sketches that might have grown into something more interesting, if given the time. Yet, here they are on Psychic Chasms, sent out into the world long before they’re ready to face the light of day.
Neon Indian’s primary composer, Alan Palomo, clearly has a yearning for the expansively electronic music of the mid-80s. Shades of New Order are all over the album, along with some New Romantic sparkle and even some bubblegum pop air-headedness. Despite the variety of negative connatotaions we associate with those genres, Neon Indian have boiled them down into something that is both pleasantly nostalgic and quite modern. The idea and the sound they’re working with seems like a lot of fun. If only there were a few more actual songs amid all the burbling keyboards and springy drum machine loops. “Deadbeat Summer” is only the first step. Psychic Chasms just doesn’t follow through on that single song’s promise.
First of all, before you can talk about the album itself, you have to talk about “Deadbeat Summer”, the album’s lead single and all-around calling card. In and of itself, “Deadbeat Summer” is a wonderfully blissed-out little nugget of indie-pop, bouncing and gurgling along without a care in the world. If I heard this song in, say, the middle of July, I’m sure I’d be listening to it about eighty times per day. Now that we’re in the middle of November and I’m greeted by the biting New England wind every time I walk out the door, it’s a bit of a different experience, but the song’s cheerfulness still shines through.
The problem with Psychic Chasms is that it fails to sound like anything more than a brightly-colored vehicle for this one great song. The synthy dance-jam “Terminally Chill” comes the closest to greatness in its own right, but the rest of the album just sounds way too thin and undercooked. There are only about four complete songs here, with the rest of the album dedicated to sonic soundscapes and sketches that might have grown into something more interesting, if given the time. Yet, here they are on Psychic Chasms, sent out into the world long before they’re ready to face the light of day.
Neon Indian’s primary composer, Alan Palomo, clearly has a yearning for the expansively electronic music of the mid-80s. Shades of New Order are all over the album, along with some New Romantic sparkle and even some bubblegum pop air-headedness. Despite the variety of negative connatotaions we associate with those genres, Neon Indian have boiled them down into something that is both pleasantly nostalgic and quite modern. The idea and the sound they’re working with seems like a lot of fun. If only there were a few more actual songs amid all the burbling keyboards and springy drum machine loops. “Deadbeat Summer” is only the first step. Psychic Chasms just doesn’t follow through on that single song’s promise.
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