Indian Summer
Hidden Arithmetics

THE REVIEW

The Indian Summer have long since disbanded, and this discography compiles the tracks released, two or three at a time, over the span of five years. Hearing them organically, linked by a sequence, all together, helps to appreciate the preciousness of each individual track.

You need to take a breath and listen carefully. Nothing seems left to chance, yet the crafting of the pieces is spontaneous. The intentionality of every effect, every note is felt, every pause carries weight. Like a skillful narrator, this album balances the tone of voice and perfect gestures to tell you its story. A story that is dust, rust, deserts.

In the structure of the pieces, there is a constant pattern. The difference between the intro and the rest of the song, slow beginnings, chaotic bursts, return to calm, then again. Even if distorted, this pattern reoccurs, but every time it is used differently. In the timid intro guitar, very slow bass lines overlap, a virtually non-existent drum. The voice, which seems like the recording of a conversation happening elsewhere, speaks softly yet unsettlingly. Then, the rhythm rises, but without creating a crescendo. The break is sharp, everything becomes furious, the tide rises, all the instruments scream, and the singer shrieks like a madman, in the perfect early '90s emo tradition.
I don't know exactly what makes this album intimate, dark, suffocating. "Truman", for instance, the fastest track, where a nasal and sing-song voice accompanies the screams, tells of a private anger, it feels like listening to the ravings of a divided self. "Sugar Pill", my favorite, sounds like a desperate invocation, in the fierce and rusty voice of the guitar.

The dusty atmospheres they create make them resemble Slint, but it's a very vague reference. The same goes for the similarity with certain screamo bands. They are not easy to label, and probably many find them banal. I compare them to Fugazi, who certainly didn't make electroclash but brought a revolution in indierock at 9.8 mercalli scale. And like many bands that follow these three threads, rather than creating images, they are more recurring numbers of human sensations, dusty and somewhat hallucinatory.