On: Neon Indian — Psychic Chasms
Message from the chillwave ambassador of purple prose, Rainbow Prose!!
Is there really a better summary of the confusing abyss of summertime languor?
I think not.
I don’t even really know what it would have been like to be an adolescent in 2009, American kids immersed in the new internet culture. Videos of teens dancing to Grizzly Bear on Myspace? Pitchfork as a positive editorial force rather than a cesspool of badly implemented buzzwords? Lusting over Zooey Deschanel? Who by then hadn’t even cracked 30, unbelievable. What a time to be alive.
I was no true casualty of the late 2000s chillwave movement (if you can call it a movement, I happen to think you can) however the synthetic euphoria temporarily caused by this kind of music, heavily rooted in nostalgic purposes but bursting with creativity and life will forever burn into memory the idyllic and perfect summer zeitgeist that never exists without its fair share of hurt, agonising pain and most importantly regret.
This album is teeming with regret, at face value one could dismiss the work on this record as a set of trivial ditties from a dead genre, and in retrospect, that appears to many to be exactly what this is. However from the point of view of a hopelessly optimistic and naive listener this artefact takes on a meaning far more important than that.
This is not a hopeless attempt at the recreation of a bygone sound, sonic blueprints resurrected for the sake of the worship of the past. Of course the ideas are familiar ideas, but this reads to me as an honest approach to understanding how kitsch and familiarity can evoke such strong attachments to the past.
The flying synths, blistering melodic refrains and distinctly colourful approach which although touted occasionally as a tribute to pastiche synthpop does not sink into such a useless role. This album is deceptively unhappy, one could easily assess the lyric sheet and understand that the purpose of creating a tight set of feel-good summer tunes was not the intention.
Instead what we have here is a glorious coping mechanism. The poetic squelch of the samples and saccharine imperfections relay exactly what is sickly sweet (emphasis on sickly) about the chillwave manifesto in the first place. The songs are nothing to scoff at either, be it the whirling inertia of Deadbeat Summer, rightfully a classic of the genre, the robotic shifting of Mind, Drips, or the quietly confident snide sonic entertainment of Local Joke.
Palomo arrived at a period-perfect ode to the times where everything should be completely square and existence should be an effortless breeze, and everything appears to be neatly in place, coupled with the harsh realisation that life has other plans, and can easily throw jabs unexpectedly and without reason. This is the hazy commemoration of those unnervingly turbulent times, experienced through the rose-tinted spectacles of hindsight.
