Indian
- Story by Nick Green
Chicago sludge trio is indigenous to frustration
The first three songs on Indian’s new record Slights and Abuse/The Sycophant offer short, sharp, Eyehategod-style shocks that should be familiar to anyone who’s ever followed Chicago politics: They’re dirty, heavy and to the point. Things get a little stranger as the group flirts with drone and ambient noise on the second half of the record, from an epic drone track (“Fatal Lack”) to a placid instrumental featuring John Bohmer of Yakuza playing a Moog (“Allotriophagy”). It’s a dramatic departure from the trio’s 2004 debut, The Unquiet Sky, a fact underscored by the label’s decision to split Slights and Abuse/The Sycophant into component parts for separate vinyl releases.
Nevertheless, guitarist/vocalist Dylan O’Toole is calling bullshit on the idea that Indian are having trouble adjusting to a deeper sonic palette. “Releasing the records separately and collecting them together on CD was the plan from the start,” he explains to Decibel in a series of cryptic e-mail responses. “We waffled rather regularly on this matter and decided in the end that the concept merged well with where we were as a band. Fearing the release might come across overstated, we did a limited pressing of the vinyl and presented it without inserts. And the internal struggle to promote drone/psych/experimental/industrial music as an active element within the band is as said: internal.”
According to O’Toole, Slights and Abuse and The Sycophant are intended as complementary parts: “Picking apart movements with only composition-based analysis is easy work… and may be missing the point.” There’s a fair amount of thematic cross-pollination between both sides of this two-headed beast, including Scott Fricke’s album art (the Virgin Mary being molested, a zombie Pope snacking on a white dove, plenty of pentagrams) and a distinct “Do what thou wilt” vibe from start to finish. “Slights and Abuse is the collective attempt to capture the personality of one serving a larger social organism,” he notes. “The Sycophant is about serving oneself with vile abandonment, a mindful aspect during the entire creative process.”
Even during its most ponderous moments, Slights and Abuse/The Sycophant boasts an intense, eerie focus. O’Toole and bassist Ron DeFries spent two years “banking riffs” before finishing The Unquiet Sky, and some of the tracks on this record spent an equally long time in gestation. Take, for instance, “Fatal Lack,” the drone piece that closes out the first half of the record and opens the floodgates for the rest: The song got an intense workout in the studio and came out differently from the version the trio wrote with fellow Chicago act Sterling. “The original sessions were painful, but bands with great dynamics seem to walk off stage with dry shirts,” O’Toole says. “We just love all in.”
