I have to give this town credit, sometimes they come through with a good artist on a weekday and this Wednesday’s Neon Indian show at The National is
I have to give this town credit, sometimes they come through with a good artist on a weekday and this Wednesday’s Neon Indian show at The National is a great example.
For the uninitiated, Neon Indian is the brain child of Mexican/Texas-born singer/songwriter Alan Palomo. It stared in 2009 with the release of Psychic Chasms. The record was solid enough Rolling Stone tagged the project as one of the best new artists of the year. Check out the single “Deadbeat Summer” which would lay the groundwork for the band’s murky retro sound:
AV Club called the release “an excellent album of balmy psychedelia and breezy infectiousness” and this set the stage for a second release, 2011’s Era Extraña. The grooves continued, generating even more acclaim and hipster cred. This lead to the folks at AdultSwim to animate a video for the single “Fallout.” Check it out below:
Other standout tracks from the 2011 record include “Polish Girl” and “Hex Girlfriend” which you can see performed live at Seattle’s KEXP below:
While all the early work was solid, it was often ahead of its time. In an age when vapour wave and chill wave and whatever else runs at 115 bpms and is set to a collection of high contrast Simpsons clips, Neon Indian should be hailed as a forefather. And nothing proved that as much as the release of last year’s Vega Intl. Night School.
Had I Vega on vinyl and it was the only means I could listen to it, it would probably have a hole in it right now. The record’s loose narrative offers a range of tracks that not only fit into Neon Indians seminal retro sound, they also paint a wacky narrative that Palomo described to Consequence of Sound as a “screwball comedy about nighttime New York.”
New York is a city that gets mythologized by a lot of filmmakers, so you have [Martin] Scorsese making his more obscure movies, like King of Comedy or After Hours, and you’ve got Abel Ferrera making Fear City and Ms. 45. Everybody has their own distorted lens through which they attempt to perceive New York. In the mixing process, I wanted to have my own grotesque, cartoonish reimagining of what I would imagine my life in New York to have been over the past few years. And if I couldn’t do it in film, then I would do it in music. That was the intent with this record.
Sure enough, tracks like “Slumlord” and “Annie” offer some of the best throw-back dance sounds we’ve heard in years. Check both of the incredibly well produced videos and songs below:
Some folks might remember Neon Indian from a DJ set at the 2013 FallLine Fest, a now defunct music festival that called RVA home for a few years. The Neon Indian set was particularly interesting because the crowd ended up rushing the stage and the square-ass ownership at the Hippodrome shut that shit down.
It was a bummer, but this Wednesday is your chance to get back what you missed! Neon Indian will take the stage alongside Classixx for what should amount to one of the best dance parties of the season, if not the year.
Doors are at 7 with the show at 8, so it should be pretty easy to dance and be home by midnight – don’t miss out, squares! Scoop your tickets here.
