 "Photo: Courtesy of Indian Jewelry")
Indian Jewelry is constantly on the edge. One of the best experimental bands to emerge from Texas in the past decade, the Houston-based group always seems to straddle the divide between beauty and destruction.
On the band’s albums, like 2008’s immaculate Free Gold, the members of Indian Jewelry tame sheets of unruly guitar noise, monolithic bass drones and decaying electronic percussion into pulsating, hypnotic jams. But there’s always a sense that everything can fall apart at any moment, imploding into a cloud of discordant noise.
Tex Kerschen, the band’s front man, explains that as a group, they seek out this place of tension and uncertainty.
“We like to let things fall apart,” he said. “Right when you get to the point where it’s about to fall apart is the fun of it for me. It’s like taking on something bigger than yourself.”
Watching Indian Jewelry play, it’s hard to miss this sense of struggle in the music. There is a constant pull between the songs themselves — with the band’s looping melodies, vocal incantations and rhythmic progressions — and the instruments creating them.
Kerschen and the rest of the band battle to control their erratic samplers, guitar feedback and bevy of effects pedals as they careen and do their best to drown out the underlying songs.
Seeking out this precarious edge, Indian Jewelry will concentrate on new material for its upcoming tour. Kerschen said that audiences should expect to hear radically different material and a few things from the past.
“Obviously, for us, the more different stuff is more satisfying to try to do; songs where you don’t know what the outcome is going to be,” he said. “On those, we know almost as little as the people in the audience.”
It’s important to note that Kerschen equivocates the musicians with observers, placing concert-goers in the same unsure position that the band seeks musically. Confronted with rapidly pulsing strobe lights and an often-overpowering wall of sound, spectators walk the line between pleasure and pain. Here, you are left in a place where the experience can go either way. Refreshingly, it’s not decided for you.
As Kerschen describes it, the band tries to create a space for people to have different kinds of experiences.
“Over time, it has become more and more vague to me,” he said. “We try to make music that people can engage in different ways as we’re playing it.”
Though this ambiguous approach to audience reaction can be off-putting at first, navigating the sometimes challenging terrain of the band’s music yields very worthwhile results. Buried underneath the swirling noise are gorgeous melodies and gripping arrangements. It’s the balance between the group’s gifted songwriting and its willingness to push their compositions to the edge of musicality that makes Indian Jewelry one of the most exciting groups putting out music today.
What: Indian Jewelry
Where: Mohawk
When: Friday at 10 p.m.
Tickets: Free
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