America, New York in particular, has a lot to answer for.
The last two or three years have yielded a humungous number of bands, emerging fresh faced and oozing talent, only to be sucked in and spat out by the relentless snipe of the blogosphere. Graduating from the hype machine isn’t easy, and Alan Palomo’s Neon Indian, last year’s first class student, has all the ingredients to do so easily.
Pitchfork’s drooling aside, Palomo’s bedroom project, in all it’s 80s aping, synth-happy glory is, feels very much last year’s news. It is for this reason that tonight’s show’s billing as an unveiling of his record ‘Psychic Chasms,’ doesn’t quite sit right.
But the album’s meandering originality means that it is still well worth our attention, and Cargo’s crowd decide to treat the gig as a celebration of just how much they love it.
Away from the laptop his songs were conceived with, Palomo says, by way of introduction, “we’re Neon Indian,” backed as he is by an eclectic bunch of ragamuffin Brooklyn musos who beef up his psychedelic pop no end. In fact, the crashing drums and relentless guitar noodling aren’t always in harmony with the intricate electronic zap Neon Indian is all about.
The distracting prominence of the instruments in the opening few songs grates, yet when they get the blend right, as they do after ‘Should’ve Taken Acid With You,’ the result is brilliantly precise and explicitly faithful to the record. Neon Indian’s isn’t the sort of music that needs or even benefits from a live twist, it is so meticulously perfect on record that anything other than a carbon copy would fail to satisfy.
Fortunately, the remaining 40 minutes offer exactly that. ‘Deadbeat Summer’ is ecstatic, with the crowd clapping the band into the intro whilst closer ‘Ephemeral Artery’ is a fluorescent monster, its clunking intro builds and builds into a drop that is as perfectly executed as anything we’ve heard on a dance floor this year.
Backlit by a VHS loop of fuzzed out cult classics splattered with the luminous colours synonymous with his alias, Palomo is a livewire. Veering between absolute concentration and a balls out rock’n’roll strut, his curly mop and leather jacket turn him into the 70s front man that never was.
The inhibiting confines of Cargo begin to frustrate, as we wonder at the prospect of a Neon Indian show backed by state of the art equipment and hi tech wizardry Palomo could only dream of. A simple projector and a modest east London sound system allow Neon Indian to captivate and, on tonight’s evidence, they deserve to follow Animal Collective and Yeasayer to a bigger stage.
Graduation day is just around the corner. For Alan Palomo, his band and those in his thrall, it can’t come soon enough.
Words by Ben Homewood
