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I have unbreakable esteem for what was produced in the late '80s by Jason Pierce and Pete Kember, better known as Spacemen 3. With few resources but many ideas, they combined feedback and velvet-influenced rhythmic iterativeness with static proto-ambient atmospheres, proposing a version of hyper-dazed (and dazing) psychedelia.
I don't care if their musical portrait of the '80s is considered essential or negligible by rock historians; I can't help but be enchanted every time I play a Spacemen 3 record. They have the innate ability to put my brain on stand-by, with the pros and cons that entails. Given this premise, it's obvious that a solo release from Kember a.k.a. Sonic Boom can only be gold in these lean times.
"Indian Giver" is the testimony of an encounter/clash that happened in 2003, between two musically distant personalities but with a shared sensitivity: the aforementioned Boom and Jim Dickinson (already producer of Big Star). The meeting took place in Dickinson's retreat, the Zebra Ranch, a barn on the north banks of the Mississippi, a detail that adds an even more surreal tone to the already strange pair. Aside from folkloric information, the musical summit seems to have been cut short after a few days of recording due to musical differences that arose.
An album half-successful then, whose major flaw lies in the lack of track uniformity. The piano bar spoken word of "Til Your Mainline Comes" and the swampy blues of Dickinson's "The Old Cow Died" don't connect well with Sonic Boom's equally solipsistic tracks, continuations of the Spacemen 3 discourse, like "Take Your Time" or "Mary" up to the reprise of "Hey Man". But when their visions align, there's no comparison: the cover of "Tomorrow Hits" by Mudhoney is rightly codeine-laden, the instrumental "Confederate Dead" evokes ghosts of the Civil War with a narcotic stride, fiddle and moog hand in hand through the southern swamps. The peak of the album, "The Lonesome Death Of Johnny Ace" is a murky Christmas murder ballad, sung by the ghost of Johnny Cash after an electroshock of German cosmic music.
Recommended to all nostalgics of the Spacemen 3 epic, especially to those who can barely stand the orchestral symphonic offshoots of Spiritualized.
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