Indian – Guiltless
I grew up in a small regional town. I knew this guy, most people called him Turds. He probably should have been taller, but he had a stoop. He probably should have been bigger, but he was hungry. Turds lived in a caravan in the backyard of his mother’s government housing four bedroom. No one liked Turds, or at least copped to liking him. He couldn’t read or write, he left school when he was thirteen or fourteen. He started smoking before he was twelve. He was terminally unemployed but somehow managed to make use of his welfare to create a nest in that backyard. But more than anything else, the striking thing about Turds’ caravan was the smoke of rolling tobacco. That rich chocolate warmth, the veins of brown and yellow lightning that rip up the side of a hand roll, the thicker than ready-blueness of the dank smoke that clings…
On the walls were Star Trek posters, maybe some Star Wars too, and in this age before always on broadband, maybe a few treasured soft porn pictures with hastily torn edges. All of this was just so ugly, so desperate, so hopeless. And yet in it there was a certain light, a kind of alternate world, a place where the familiar and the fantastic converged to create a force-field of protection. From his mother, the never-ending bullies and the early morning sun. Indian’s new album Guiltless takes the listener to similar seedy sites of darkness inflected with fantasy. On first listen, Guiltless feels like a black metal flattening of the throb and plod of previous releases. Everything seems more uniform, streamlined and simple. It is not until one carefully listens that the Star-Trek-posters-on-the-wall fantasy starts to reveal itself. For behind the tautly stretched, hypnotic riff barrage is a Lovecraftian, other dimensional swirl that will have you guessing if it is all just in your mind.
Currently available on vinyl for a paltry price ($12 here in Japan, including postage).
No comments:
Post a Comment