Neon Indian is Alan Palomo, a man with seemingly endless ability to eschew predictability and create music that sounds simple and complicated at the same time. It’s probably not original, but the fact that he manages to make it sound so is a testament to the amount of ideas flowing through and around Neon Indian’s debut release Psychic Chasms.
Aside from the brief interstitials that appear at irregular intervals throughout the album and the somewhat prosaically titled ‘I Should Have Taken Acid With You’, Psychic Chasms is rarely derivative; a common pitfall for electronic based music. Instead, the listener has as much fun guessing what sound might come next as Palomo presumably had crafting the songs.
‘Local Joke’, ‘Terminally Chill’ and the titular track all fall on the right side of extravagant, not holding back on the synthcapades and sounding like everything was filtered through a rainbow. Along with ‘Deadbeat Summer’ and ‘Laughing Gas’, the song titles pretty much tell you to expect that much. I don’t know how it avoids sounding cheesy, but it just does. My best guess is the injection of lead breaks and the like, best demonstrated on ‘Terminally Chill’, that give the album some real musicality, rather than constantly sounding like a guy twiddling on his computer.
Psychic Chasms’ greatest achievement is the synaesthesia like symptoms that it imparts on the listener, making everything around you just that much brighter.
