Indian
From All Purity

It seems that this time the Indians have hit the jackpot! But who the hell are the Indians?, most of you might ask. They are not newcomers, these four musicians from Chicago who started to gain some visibility only starting from their fourth album (“Guiltness”, from 2011), mainly thanks to the support of an important label in the extreme scene like Relapse. And it's on their fifth attempt, with “From All Purity” (released at the start of the year), that they find the balance, as well as the inspiration to further emancipate themselves from the canonical form of sludge-metal that characterized their origins over ten years ago. Some mention noise, drone music, and even black-metal, but if it's true that former Wolves in the Throne Room member Will Lindsay is involved, and at the mixer sits none other than Sanford Parker (a prominent producer/musician in the current post-extreme-metal American scene, notable for his work with Minsk, of course, but also with fascinating projects like Corrections House or various black collaborations, Nachtmystium and Twilight among others), despite all this, as it was said, I wouldn’t go too far by invoking who knows what migrations towards the trendy U.S. Black Metal vein.

The Indians' sound is just contaminated by the aforementioned elements, but remains monolithic, compact, pachydermic: it does not give in to the exhausting voids preached by drone music, nor does it attempt the card of melodic infiltrations typical of black-metal. The reference parameters that delineate the degeneration and the chaos set to music by these sound terrorists continue to be “reassuring” names like Eyehategod, Neurosis, Today is the Day, Khanate, musical monstrosities that have known how to remodulate the belligerences of the most bloodthirsty hardcore through a more experimental approach, tearing and fraying hatred and violence until they become madness and creeping despair. In fact: guitars heavy as tons, extensions to white noise, and vitriolic voices. Already the first moments of the opener “Rape” are paradigmatic in this sense: in the ex abrupto opening, a barbaric descent of downtuned chords and dissonant harmonies, disconnected beats and pervasive creaks, an imposing and viscous sonic mass whose ripples imply an inner turmoil of immense proportions, that titanism is detectable which can be as majestic as it is claustrophobic, characterizing all of Indian's work throughout “From All Purity”. Sounds are clear and powerful despite their corrosive and lethal nature, the paradoxical result of Sanford Parker's careful mixing work.

Only six tracks for not even forty minutes in length: at least in terms of length, the Indians spare us. For the rest, the album is a tour de force that requires a considerable effort on the part of the listener: the four musicians, although not standing out individually, manage to maintain tight control over the sonic matter they handle, taming the chaos with a solid, epic, catastrophic guitar work, undoubtedly doom in imprint, and containing it with measured and diligent drumming. Amongst these plagues emerges uncontrollably the ferocity of Dylan O'Toole's epileptic-throat-tearing vocals, apparently not too distant from typical black-metal croak, but which in more than one instance betrays its sludge/hardcore derivation (at times it seems an extreme parody of the good Johnny Morrow of the never too mourned Iron Monkey), and particularly in the abandon to schizoid bursts that closely recall the perverse brilliance of Steve Austin (Today is the Day).

But what really happens in these six long compositions? Apparently not much: the neurotic post-hardcore of Indians moves with a determined, but unidirectional step. The tracks can be slightly slower or slightly faster, but maintain the same insane propensity for psychic devastation through repetition: a modus operandi whose purpose seems to be to drive the listener out of their mind. Among the muscular agitation of the guitars and the bass lines, there are melodic lines that give complexity to a sound that is violent, but aims equally at the mind as well as the heart, likely to annihilate both. And so “The Impetus Bleeds” and “Directional” continue on the same wavelengths, they are black monoliths, prolongations of the same wave of apocalyptic violence, where rhythm patterns are as simple as they are effective.

If the chaos reproduced in the first three tracks is pure sonic assault, a bubble that slowly swells and is destined to generate cracks and fractures, shaking walls and making plaster fall from the ceiling (and I'm not just referring to the walls of one's home, but also the bony shell housing our cerebral matter), on the second triad, the discourse seems to divert toward the domain of the transcendental: in “Rhetoric of No,” the beats become nervous, the tension grows until the obsessive final release phase, which among torn bass strings and whirlpools of feedback, naturally flows into the pure noise of “Clarify,” a cacophonic maelstrom based on distorted frequencies. Nothing but the agonizing prelude to the desolate arpeggio that slithers subcutaneously along the cracked grooves of the final “Disambiguation,” a definitive monument to the emotional short-circuit staged by the Chicago outfit: a dolorous river of psychic and emotional debris that in its melodic coda finally adopts those solutions (melodic riffs and double bass) akin to a more distinctly black-metal sensibility that we have been expecting from the start.

These Indians, in conclusion, may not be as brilliant or original as their mentors or other contemporaneous exponents of this new wave of malaise music that loves to combine sludge, doom, noise, post-metal, and often black-metal. But this “From All Purity” places itself with full dignity among this year's most interesting releases, additionally laying important premises for a path that appears to be on the rise and could assure these travelers in tattered clothes a place of honor among the most celebrated representatives of the field.