I was sitting in front of my new laptop today lamenting the death of Punk Rock…again. Punk has lived and died more times in the past twenty years than Paul McCartney during the Abbey Road years. Then I listened to the new Indians album and saw a minor resurgence on the horizon. Their self-titled debut is like listening to the offspring of a twisted triumvirate coalescence of David Byrne, David Bowie and Billie Joe Armstrong.
The album itself is good, not great, but good. It’s noisy and epic, with short bursts of brilliance from lead singer Joe Hursley and the rest of the band (you can learn more about them in our upcoming interview). They’re on the right track and seem to still be refining their sound and direction. “Dream Store” is the track that showed the most potential as far as I’m concerned. It has a convincing hook, great lyrics, and just the right amount of intensity. The solo, while short, was certainly worth the listen. If I were trying to figure out the direction this band should go in while looking towards the future it would start with “Dream Store.”
One song I didn’t like at all was “Shake”. I had acid flashbacks to Powerman 5000 tracks, a time when I made numerous musical choices before I learned that radio was no longer a viable place to discern what music was good and what was crap. So this being the worst and “Dream Store” being the best everything else falls somewhere in between. Far better than most of the mediocre crap that is being shoveled our way, but leaving room for improvement. 1039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours wasn’t Green Day’s best album, in fact it’s probably their worst, but they were still discovering their own potential.
Indians will figure out their potential. You can hear the talent oozing out of the instruments; it’s just a matter of putting it together in a cohesive, structured album that blows the doors off the collective music community. This is a good place to start, where they go from here is up to them.
