Indian Summer
Science 1994

I don't stash my things, I scatter them. I like to surprise myself by finding my driver's license between the sheets or opening a drawer and seeing things I didn’t even know I owned, which are usually junk turned into trinkets.
Photos. I find old photos almost everywhere, haphazardly, like breadcrumbs. I despise old photos. I remember that every time I see one. People change, I don't, that's all. Hair changes, styles change, trends, expressions, and so they age. Lucky them. I don't age. Never. Always the same, always the same expression, always the same type of clothes. Converse in summer, jeans all year round. Montgomery by ordinance for the cold, leather jacket for the mild seasons. At most, a cardigan for cool summer evenings. Once a stock is worn out, another is purchased. A kind of Dylan Dog without the mystery vocation and that abhors horror.

The other day I was thinking, flipping through old magazines that weren’t mine. A special on the so-called "Grunge," sadness galore. What horrible photos. Horrible colors, combat boots everywhere, loose socks, bandanas, bermudas, woolen underwear. I thought: if someone dared to walk around the neighborhood dressed like that, they’d get slapped silly.
Yes, it’s a nice neighborhood, nothing to say, but the problem is always the same. The problem with being fashionable is that you end up unfashionable. The beauty and ugliness of being unfashionable is that you’ll always be unfashionable. Basically, it’s a negative-sum game, where wherever you turn, you get hit... musically speaking.
In short, while some insisted on singing about addiction problems or a dead child - yes, the world is a vampire and blah blah blah - there were those minding their own business, printing songs on 7", in splits and hyperbolic compilations, for labels so miserable that perhaps they never even existed. And perhaps it’s better that way.

Indian Summer were young and bold. The world, they could have split it in two, too bad they just had no use for it. They lasted a short while, almost two years, and couldn’t even make an album. Just scattered pieces that add up to nine gems, 35 minutes, closely related to a masterpiece. Science 1994, for God's sake.

The formula is to mix the Post-Rock of Slint with certain Fugazi melodies - Guy Piccioto uber alles -, plus a tendency towards an airy and fluttering post-hardcore that at times becomes nasty and vulgar. All seasoned with an incredibly strong personality and self-referentiality that borders on the pathological. It was called Emocore, a silly name, proof that everywhere the same foolishness is opted for.

"I Think You're Train is Leaving", soft and rhythmic, twists on itself before the distortion sets it free, then the voice becomes thin, small, overshadowed by a wall of guitars. A little man under something big. The guitar weave of "Black/Touch The Wings of an Angel... Doesn't Mean You Can Fly" sounds more or less like Fugazi deciding to cover "Breadcrumb Trail" by giving up their usual sounds, then they open the gas, melody, Na-Na-Na-Na.
The riff of "Aren't You an Angel" - the first song of the first, self-titled, 7" - thins out Helmet until they are non-existent, until losing them, making them disappear into the vulgar and chaotic "Millimeter", with the voice that spits out the soul, as if it were Mexican food. For "Woolworm/Angry Son" a thousand tears wouldn't be enough to describe it, to tell of that guitar that insinuates, explores what shouldn’t be said... a sort of "Washer", that Slint one which always nearly makes me cry. Of the same beauty, made of the same sensations. "Sugar Pill" follows the same recipe: small, as a background and then aggressive, imposing.

It’s ethereal music, as much as a "sane" twenty-year-old could do something ethereal. First it becomes light, then heavy and falls, falls ruinously. The music of Indian Summer, well, it resembles a joyful cliff dive that ends in tragedy, with the superficial diver splattered on a rock he hadn't considered. There's something gloomy and, at the same time, sunny; a dead person and people continuing to swim.