Invasive Exotics

Album Review

Any album with a song called "Partying with Jandek" on it likely has its heart in the right place (especially since it's now entirely possible to do so); as it stands, the whole of Invasive Exotics is a fractured, snarling stomp and zoneout that resists easy categorizing, as much in thrall to garage rock and psych forebears as to the likes of indie rock experimentalism and the gothier side of American music. (It's perhaps no surprise that Don Bolles helped out on some of the engineering.) The core trio of Indian Jewelry — singer/guitarists Erika Thrasher and Tex Kerschen and drummer Rodney Rodriguez — whips up a sound at once primitive and modern, electronic tribal rites that aren't, say, the Sun City Girls at work but somehow find a parallel space. Thrasher's contributions on keyboard — the bubbling notes concluding "Lesser Snake," the whirs and noises filling up "Lying on the Floor" — further spike things up, while her singing settles into the background but still sounds sharp. A song like "Dirty Hands" shows how well the band has assimilated its various influences — everything from the crumbling distance of lo-fi to the obsessive focused mantras of acts like the Stooges and Spacemen 3 can be heard in it, Thrasher's overlay of keyboards almost smothering Kerschen's reflective singing. The centerpiece of the album is its longest, the ten-minute "Going South," and the combination of a steady beat accompanied by various drum fills, Kerschen's heavily echoed vocals, and the interplay between frazzled guitar and keyboard parts results in a murky epic in miniature. It might be the closest a band has come to the alien quality of Chrome at their finest in many years, no small thing to achieve.