indian jewelry

Totaled

Texan band Indian Jewelry are back with a new full-length, following up on the scrappy pleasures of 2008's Free Gold. There's something new afoot here, as can be heard from the dark basslines and pitched-down vocals of first track 'Oceans'. It sounds as if the band are offering their own twisted take on electronic pop music, and based on this opener the result is something akin to a shoegazing Fever Ray. The machine gun drum machines and layers of fuzz channelled for 'Look Alive' take a turn towards slightly more obscure territory, but by the time the band reach 'Excessive Moonlight' they've fully got their act together. This entry takes deep, gloomy reverbs and a stalking low-end presence to weave a startlingly bleak pop gem that truly leaps out from the remainder of the tracklist. Perhaps if Nite Jewel covered a cut from The Cure's Pornography album, something like this would be the outcome. 'Tono Bungay' and 'Diamond Things' come close to repeating the trick, but this wouldn't be an Indian Jewelry record if it wasn't littered with sprawling oddities like 'Simulation' and 'Parlous Siege And Chapel' that willfully sabotage the band's burgeoning pop potential.