Send "Neon Indian " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Some people laugh at chillwave precisely because so many of its practitioners lack a sense of humor. But Alan Palomo is an exception. In 2009, the Texas-raised musician's Neon Indian project debuted with the excellent Psychic Chasms. Like a lot of young musicians, the then-21-year-old Palomo was inspired by Ariel Pink, and he certainly shared that art-pop oddball's sense of irreverence. Below the static and sneakily intricate synth patterns, Psychic Chasms was a funny, playful record, with goofy, drugged-out moments exemplified by song titles like "Laughing Gas".As the buzz around Psychic Chasms increased, the narrative shifted. Neon Indian attained a surprising level of popularity that was bolstered by a rocking, party-ready live show, drawing in fans of populist acts like Passion Pit and MGMT. After that raised profile, Neon Indian's second album, Era Extraña, shows a commitment to tighter, wide-reaching songcraft and appeal. The production value is at a higher level, with additional mixing by big-name studio guy Dave Fridmann (the Flaming Lips, MGMT), who forgoes his usual noise-bombing style for a more subtle approach. Those drawn to Psychic Chasms' warped view of pop or outré work like the difficult, abstract EP with the Flaming Lips last year may be disappointed; Era Extraña instead builds on Neon Indian's one-off single with Green Label Sound last year, the straightforward "Sleep Paralysist". Relfecting the shift, there's an increased focus on streamlined melodies; the vocal gasps and moans that streaked previous highs like "Terminally Chill" are still here, just not as suffocating. The wordless chorus of "Hex Girlfriend" is all but set to rock a festival stage or two, while "Halogen (I Could Be a Shadow)" is a rush of life-affirming, upwards-moving melodic optimism. The music itself is intricate and accomplished, with dizzying layers of synth arrangements and stray sounds crammed into even the most big-tent cuts-- we're talking rocket-ship noises, phone conversations, lasers, and visceral video-game samples. Despite the kitchen-sink arrangements, the results are taut and defined. Palomo is anything but sloppy and he seems focused on the album as a unified whole: one of his finest songs yet, the melancholy, remix-ready "Arcade Blues", was given bonus-track status because he felt it didn't fit in with Era Extraña's overriding themes. Era Extraña is partly abut love. It may not be "breakup album," in the strictest sense, but the record sounds romantic and lovesick and looks toward sounds that bring these feelings to mind, from the sugary crunch of Isn't Anything-era My Bloody Valentine ("The Blindside Kiss") to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark ("Fallout"). The feel of Era Extraña is expansive and lonely, like someone staring at the night sky in solitude (he recorded the bulk of it solo in Helsinki, Finland during the dead of winter, where, according to a recent Pitchfork interview, he was often on the verge of losing his shit mentally.) Another topic touched on in that interview was the album's sense of longing, and "Future Sick" conveys the feeling of growing older in a world that's growing faster than you are. Palomo bemoans having to look towards past the present under seasick synths, singing mid-volume under his own creation's drunken abstraction and promising to "wake when things start to get peculiar"....full text |
| Pastemagazine |
| In the first few seconds of Era Extraña, we hear the sound of swirling 8-bit particles rapidly coming to a celestial boil. What follows seems to resemble what the birth of the universe must have sounded like had the Big Bang occurred inside the original Nintendo Entertainment System. This is the world in which Alan Palomo sets his sophomore release under the chillwave moniker Neon Indian. The opening track, “Heart: Attack,” is the first installment in an instrumental trilogy that runs throughout the album, tying it together. This cohesiveness is something that sets Era Extraña apart from its predecessor immediately. That’s not to say that 2009’s Psychic Chasms was disjointed, but it was certainly fragmented. The intention to create a fluid record was there, particularly with the sample from “6669 (I Don’t Know If You Know)” resurfacing in the finale “7000 (Reprise),” for example. But with his second run, Palomo gets it right. Perhaps the newfound focus present in the record came from the setting in which the album was created. Palomo wrote and recorded Era Extraña in constant solitude last winter in a small apartment in Helsinki, Finland. “It’s the closest you can get to feeling like you’re at the edge of the earth,” he said of the experience in a recent press release. “And there were moments where I lost sight of what I was really there to do.” Palomo certainly expresses these feelings of being lost and alone in the themes and tone of the new record. Part of what makes Era Extraña a great follow-up to Psychic Chasms is that it features the same lazy summer feel that made Neon Indian’s debut so popular. But this time around, it’s slightly veiled in darkness—maybe not darkness, perhaps, but a definite dimming of the lights. The sun has gone down. Summer is over. Summer may not be the only thing that’s gone either. The LP is wrought with expressions of lost love. If you can’t quite catch the lyrics of Palomo’s reverb-drenched vocals, a quick glance at song titles like “The Blindside Kiss” and “Hex Girlfriend” are all you need to get where he’s coming from....full text |
| Avclub |
| 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 was breezy, featherweight fun, and hardly worth the knee-jerk contentiousness that chillwave acts tend to inspire. Psychic Chasms was likeable, but also ephemeral—the very definition of music with nothing at stake. Era Extraña has the trappings of a weightier effort, with Neon Indian mastermind Alan Palomo expanding on the handmade soundscapes of Psychic Chasms with producer Dave Fridmann, who has a long history of shepherding small-time indie-rockers into the recording big leagues. But while Era Extraña sounds a bit fuller—the tinkling keyboard riff of “Polish Girl” rings out with greater clarity, and the vocals on “Future Slick” are creamier—the album is basically Psychic Chasms Part II. That isn’t a bad thing to be, though like most sequels, it’s less satisfying than its predecessor. Era Extraña isn’t served well by coming out a few months after Within And Without, the elegant full-length debut by Palomo’s chillwave counterpart Ernest Greene of Washed Out. Where Within is an immaculately conceived graduation from Greene’s early lo-fi work, Extraña is a minor refinement that still feels chintzy in places. The breathy “Halogen (I Could Be A Shadow)” alludes to the seductive pop of the early-’80s New Romantic movement, but Palomo doesn’t totally commit to the lush sound this music requires. Era Extraña still has plenty of hooks to offer, but Palomo has to take both feet out of the bedroom to move his music forward....full text |
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