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Neon Indian: Lee's Palace video and interview →
Five months on, and I haven’t tired of Neon Indian at all.
Psychic Chasms, that woozy, wobbly ’80s-biting synthpop debut album, placed at #8 on my Best-of-2009 list, and at #48 on the decade-end chart, but it’s been such a grower it’s busted a move up both charts, probably to inside of the Top Five and Top 40 on the same lists.
On a larger scale, Neon Indian’s had a groovy 2010. Alan Palomo and company played the major indie music festivals in Toronto and Austin, and lit up Jimmy Fallon’s NBC talk show in early February - the latter a last-second gift from Fallon when a scheduled band failed to make the date. Fallon’s got a supporter for life in Palomo, I bet.
Last month, Neon Indian added a top-grade single to the discography in “Sleep Paralysist,” a marginally cleaner (read: more produced) synthpop gem that owes a little to Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Yellow Magic Orchestra. Get it from Green Label Sound. It’s free, so come on.
And here’s a link to Aux.TV’s profile on Neon Indian, pieced together when they played Toronto’s Lee’s Palace in early March. Click here.
Video
NEON INDIAN - Terminally Chill/Ephemeral Artery medley (2010)
I couldn’t’ve cared less when Jimmy Fallon got Conan O’Brien’s old 12:35 gig last year, but somewhere along the way I’ve been schooled, big-time. The last 10 minutes of Jimmy’s show has become a parade of left-field faves, and it’s apparent the host’s Shazam application played a large part in the booking process.
Kings Of Convenience were booked to play Late Night With Jimmy Fallon on February 11, 2010, but bailed due to illness, so Fallon got on his iPhone and lined up Austin’s Neon Indian, a genius move that put a way underground, synth-led, noise-pop band on national television, giving them a boost they might otherwise never have received. And they responded with this super clip.
Craftily cut ‘n’ pasting two of debut album Psychic Chasm’s best songs into a medley, the live incarnation of Neon Indian (otherwise a one-man studio project) is definitely meatier, but no less gloriously skewed. Neon Indian was a late entry in my 2009 record-of-the-year sweepstakes, and it’s been hot from the word go. Something about the knotty, early-’80s synth-funk keyboard lines really appeals, but the writing and fuzzy production sells it: in parts, Psychic Chasms recalls one of those ah-ha! YouTube moments when you call up some half-forgotten Saturday morning “youth programming” show, only to realize the incidental music kicked ass. The Neon Indian bonus is these are fragments that play like full songs, colliding or morphing into a very likeable whole. The Fallon “medley” bridges with a heavy feedback section that might be the weirdest thing NBC’s aired in awhile. It’s not enough to make up for screwing Conan, but in Jimmy we can trust.
(Fallon is still mispronouncing song and album titles and calling everyone “buddy” or “pal” - which can be amusingly dorky, as in when greeting Morrissey last spring, or Neon Indian’s cutie-pie keyboardist Leanne Macomber - but I’m giving him lots of leeway so long as the last minutes of his show remain so must-see T.V.)
While you’re grooving to my pet band of 2010, check out the cat in the hammerhead face mask in the group of fans behind the drummer. What the fuck?
