Era Extraña
“Heart: Attack”—the minute-long intro of Neon Indian\'s 2011 album *Era Extraña*—instantly brings to mind the ‘80s-based, synth-heavy psychedelia of previous Neon Indian albums (2009’s *Psychic Chasms* and its 2010 follow-up, *Mind CTRL: Psychic Chasms Possessed*). But the next song, “Polish Girl,” is a sexy departure that has more in common with the cosmic disco of Air, Phoenix, or Vega (the other electro-tinged project fronted by Neon Indian’s Alan Polomo). The gauzy, shoegaze-inspired tune “The Blindside Kiss” blends *Isn’t Anything*–era My Bloody Valentine guitars with plenty of *Psychocandy*-era Jesus and Mary Chain reverb. Some Moog-like undulations hint at Stereolab’s retro-futurism on “Hex Girlfriend” before the tune takes a detour into more electronically flourished dream pop. Fans of Ariel Pink’s penchant for pumping beauty through murky fidelity will find a comforting familiarity in the instrumental “Heart: Decay” before the title track contrasts big distorted bass lines with shimmering electro-pop.
Forgoing the scrappy charm of Psychic Chasms, Alan Palomo's sophomore album-- recorded mostly alone in Finland in the dead of winter-- chronicles the Texas-raised musician's solitary longing and heartsickness with a commitment to tighter, wide-reaching songcraft.
A bedrock album of the loosely defined electronic music genre known (derisively, in some quarters) as “chillwave,” Neon Indian’s 2009 debut, Psychic Chasms, was an unassuming collection of smudged, psychedelic synth-pop songs seemingly inspired by old training-video soundtracks and secondhand ’80s pop mix-tapes. It…
In the first few seconds of Era Extraña , we hear the sound of swirling 8-bit particles rapidly coming to a celestial boil.…
What do you call chillwave that’s not actually that, well, chilled? LP2 sees Alan Palomo and co.
Neon Indian's woozy take on chillwave takes a turn for the darker on this second album, writes <strong>Killian Fox</strong>