ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #10 NEON INDIAN ERA ETRANA

Albums of the Year 2011: #10

Neon Indian - Era Extraña

In a perfect world, this album would've been the followup to Neon Indian's globe conquering single "Sleep Paralysist," a song so good it should've turned Alan Palomo into one of the biggest stars of his generation and bought him a spaceship made of diamonds. That it isn't is just one more piece of evidence (in case anyone needed it) that we do not, in fact, live in the best of all possible worlds. Alas, Era Extraña is only the followup to a well-received indie album, Psychic Chasms, that made Neon Indian something like the Prince of Chillwave. There is very little of Psychic Chasms on this album, though--the song that sounds most like that album is the title track, oddly enough--and it's hard not to blame Palomo from moving on. The album bears the marks of its creation during a wintry few weeks in Helsinki  (a pretty intense experience from the sound of it: "After being in Helsinki for four weeks, there was this Werner Herzog monologue happening in my head, driving me crazy, like, [in Herzog accent] 'What is music?'"), which makes it less summery than Psychic Chasms and decidedly less "chill."

If you're not getting chillwave from a Neon Indian album, though, what are you getting? In some ways, this is much more of a straight electro-pop record, but an electro-pop record that makes Palomo's debt to My Bloody Valentine (really only clear in the guitars towards the end of "Deadbeat Summer" on his debut) more apparent and that gives a nod to LCD Soundsystem style disco (on the album's highlight, "Suns Irrupt," which would fit nicely alongside "Get Innocuous"). Era Extraña starts off with a scene-stealing instrumental, "Heart: Attack"--the first part of a three part suite scattered throughout the album--which borrows the amazing liftoff from "Sleep Paralysist" in service of an opening every bit as revelatory as "Wildlife Analysis." The first half of the album foregrounds the shoegaze ("Blindside Kiss" wouldn't sound out of place on MBV's You Made Me Realise EP, one of his favourites, apparently), but also introduces a new, more vinegary sound to Palomo's synth palette (used to good effect on the swirling "Polish Girl"). There are times that the album gets a little too easy--it's impossible to say "Hex Girlfriend" and "Fallout" are anonymous given how much they sound like Neon Indian (and who else right now uses gasps quite as well as he does in his vocals?)--but over a flat out amazing second half the album really commands the listener's attention. "Future Sick" is the big pop moment that "Fallout" thinks it is, and "Heart: Release" is the funkiest thing he's released since "Ephemeral Artery." This is to say nothing of "Suns Irrupt" a droning epic that (hopefully) points the way forward to something like his Sound of (Neon) Silver and "Arcade Blues," a return to the shoegaze of "Blindside Kiss," but fitted out in chrome and neon.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME AND OTHER POINTS

This morning at 8:30 I turned 25. Happy birthday to me! Seeing as how one of my students told me yesterday that he's 24, this is probably a good thing: I'm still officially older than all of my students. The prevailing trend from friends who've wished me happy birthday today is something along the lines of "I can't believe how young you are." I'll take that as a good thing--a sort of maturity for my age--rather than a "My god, you look so terrible I'd never believe you're only 25!" type of thing. How did I spend my birthday, you ask? Scrambling to finish reading for class and giving a presentation. About the usual, then. Birthdays are usually good for flushing out a few long lost friends and reestablishing lines of communication, though, and that's definitely been the case today.

A few thoughts to make this post not a total waste.

1. I can't believe that no one has used this song in the opening scene of an action or gangster movie. It seems like any director with a movie set in an urban space who wanted to introduce his/her protagonist as some kind of tough, gritty, impossibly cool figure would jump on this. I can see it now: various quick-cut establishing shots of the city, a pause and a black screen for an instant, then at 2:12, BAM!, shot of protagonist walking down the street. Perfect. If there's a movie that does this already, I need to see it yesterday.

2. Pitchfork did an interview with Alan Palomo (aka Neon Indian) in anticipation of the release of Era Extrana today. It's a good read and confirms my impression (based on a five minute or so conversation with Palomo after a show) that he's a genuinely nice guy. I was particularly struck by Palomo's statements that:

I can’t pretend that I don’t subscribe to Internet music culture in that I discover new music and old music simultaneously. In order to generate something that’s indicative of the future, we’re trudging around this cultural wasteland of the past and finding these little pieces to play around with and recontextualize. It can all feel like one big collage piece.
But it was important for me to not use any pre-existing material and completely self-generate this album on both the audio and visual sides. You can’t always just put color filters in 80s aerobic videos or take stuff from public-access and look at it in this very ironic, self-conscious way. That only takes you so far. . . .
[A]ll you can do is ignore the annoying hum of the machine and focus on making art that makes you excited to be alive.  

and

Well, Era Extraña translates into a couple of things, but the thing that I thought was really funny was that the word in Spanish for "strange" is also the word for "to miss something." It’s rooted in the same sensation. And I do have this eerie feeling of rapidly-approaching singularity, or the idea that by the time that I’m 33, reality will not exist in the same plane as it did before. It's cool, but also a little creepy.  

On the one hand, this seems like the legacy of life after postmodernism: irony is dead and tired, we've murdered the real, history is done, there's nothing left but to make pastiches until the sun goes nova. On the other hand, though, "making art that makes you excited to be alive" and considering the combination of "strangeness" and "miss[ing] something" that the album's title conjures up seems to underscore the connection of Neon Indian specifically--and chillwave in general--to hauntology. I've only had a chance to give the album one listen, but I'm very interested/excited to see what it reveals on deeper listens.

3. I had a great meeting with a professor yesterday that left me feeling a lot less panicked about, well, everything. Sometimes it's nice to hear someone say banal platitudes like "it's not a race," "everything will be fine," "don't worry," etc., etc. I floated a vague dissertation idea that was well received (and somewhat backfired when I mentioned that I'd written my MA thesis on a similar topic--now the professor wants to see my MA thesis and I'm mortified at what the response will be. I'm really proud of having done it, but the thinking and the writing [oh god, the writing] is kind of embarrassing at this point), and after lying awake the other night worrying that I have no direction or purpose in my academic life, I now feel like I have a path to follow, even if it's shaky and not really constructed yet. It's enough to let me sleep, though, which is all that matters at this point.