Neon Indian is a chill wave band from Texas, USA. The music is composed entirely by Alan Palomo, who is also known for his work with the band Ghosthustler. Psychic Chasms is Neon Indian’s first album, the sound it is like the typical loud, funk-pounding beats that have become a foundation for many artists who have emerged within 2010. However, unlike these other bands, Neon Indian’s sound is a lot more delicate, a lot more mellow and relaxed, and it also gives me the idea that it has slight similarities with Jamiroquai.
What I liked the most about Psychic Chasms is the amount of changes of tempo and inputted sounds that are added to the tracks on it, this makes it impossible to say that you can get bored of one rhythm beat in a song because it will get layered into another sound or will be up-temped in a quick manner. This isn’t a case of the songs being completely different as to how they started either; the songs all retain some elements of their foundations from the opening of it. For example, the song “Deadbeat Summer” has that swift, slick notes that cut through the sound played at numerous points throughout it, so that the song still contains some familiarity to it. However, every song on this LP have fallen victim to being given these layers upon layers of extra noise and unfortunately it’s resulted in all songs sounding the same because we’ve already listened to these effects in the previous song.
This also brings me on to say that there are some tendencies that bands such as Microdot Gnome and Supergrass use that are contained in Psychic Chasms, it’s only a slight subtle sound, but it’s the use of adding “natural” sounds to songs to give them more of an earthy sound. The song that I am talking about that shows this is “Terminally Chill” which uses the bird’s song as a great anecdote of relating back to the song title.
Some aspects of this album that I did not like were that some of the songs are far too short to enjoy. For instance, the song “(if I knew, I’d tell you)” has a very nice continuing beat to it, and you expect it to go on to becoming a much lengthier track, but it just ends abruptly. This also brings me further into the final point which is I would have liked to see Neon Indian produce much lengthier songs to include on this album, though I would have even sufficed to have one long track on this LP that Alan Palomo could have used to experiment and take his sound even further and see what the output of it is. I feel that Neon Indian’s sound is somewhat restricted even on the longest tracks on the LP and could be enhanced and much fuller and better if it was able to have more time for experimental sounds to be mixed within too, perhaps going the route of LCD Soundsystem and having an 8 minute song? I don’t know. This could be a sign that Palomo is not confident enough in bringing out length in his songs because he is unsure of where to go with the sound, but this is merely an assumption from me.
Overall:
I feel that this is a solid debut effort from Neon Indian, however I do feel they could have kept the changes off a few tracks, but it is clear that this sound on Psychic Chasms has a lot of potential to it and could go off onto any kind of tangent that Palomo sees best. I am going to rate Neon Indian – Psychic Chasms a 7/10.
