My physique immediately locks in with the driving drumbeat — my pulse, my respiratory, the insatiable urge to bop alongside. The guitar chords ripple and shimmer, and a tail of colourful dissolving static appears to comply with each regular strum. The music feels plastic and brittle but glows like a neon signal, blurring collectively the natural and artificial into one thing dirty and hyperreal. It carries on on this alluring state for about 15 seconds. Then, after a quick pause, the bass drops, Joey Vannucchi’s grizzled vocals enter the body, and that bleary, distant magnificence shifts to the foreground, its undertow now so highly effective that I’m immediately swept away.
“The Movement” is mesmerizing. It’s electrifying. It’s a type of tracks that snaps you to consideration, rewires your mind, and makes you an on the spot fan. So it went two months in the past when From Indian Lakes made their grand return after a decade away. It didn’t matter that I had no historical past with the band, no context for his or her music past what I might infer, no data of Vannucchi’s backstory rising up surrounded by the California wilderness. All that mattered was that I used to be caught up in “The Movement,” that this track — about getting caught in unhealthy patterns and fixations — was actually carrying me someplace good.
In the end it led to Head Void, Vannucchi’s sixth album as From Indian Lakes. Out this week, it marks his return to the challenge after 5 years releasing a wealth of softer, woozier music as Joe Vann. The From Indian Lakes challenge has developed in fascinating methods since Vannucchi created the MySpace profile Songs From Indian Lakes within the late 2000s. His earliest albums had been shaded with Model New’s darkly epic emo, the downcast splendor of Dying Cab For Cutie, and varied Christian-adjacent post-hardcore acts — a becoming canvas for skeptically dissecting the contours of religion. Ever since, From Indian Lakes have developed in a dreamier route, incorporating parts of contemporary shoegaze paragons like DIIV and Nothing and even some traces of chillwave whereas sustaining vestiges of their emo origins. Their most up-to-date LP, 2019’s Dimly Lit, discovered Vannucchi edging towards the hypnotic chugging rhythms that course all all through Head Void.
Not that each track on the brand new album anxiously percolates like “The Movement.” Opener “Water” is extra of a shimmering post-rock gradual drift. “Maintain Me Down” plaintively kilos and plods. “Shrine” glimmers gorgeously, as if suspended in midair, whereas “The Wilderness” creeps alongside the floor at a grungy gait en path to its brightly flaring refrains. But even the slower songs faucet into a standard vibe, a grainy, holographic rendering of the melancholia that Vannucchi spends a lot of the album attempting to outrun. Usually, that chase does play out within the type of hard-charging backbeats that give the songs a contagious momentum, as heard on one other distinctive single, “The Strains,” and on tracks just like the fervently driving shoegazer “Holy,” the Radiohead-indebted “I Lay Totally different,” and the jangly, propulsive “Spilling Over.”
Using the jetstream of those tracks is Vannucchi’s softly rasping tenor, typically joined by a refrain of voices that come off like gang-chanting ghosts. His voice is completely suited to the feel of the music, lovely however distressed. As nearer “Maintain Me” glides towards the horizon like an Alcest track, he dips into his decrease register and uncovers a clean, ethereal sound that transports From Indian Lakes to a barely completely different dimension. Vannucchi makes a compelling narrator, pained however resilient, and in contrast to some shoegazers you possibly can normally make out what he’s singing about.
There’s a good quantity of affection, intercourse, and heartbreak in there, in addition to what reads like non secular disenchantment. Typically it’s not completely clear which of these topics is in view: “Each step that I go by/ Is additional out out of your sunshine now/ Each sip of soiled water/ Is filtered out by means of your stained glass.” Continuously Vannucchi turns to vivid, bodily imagery to convey these sensations. He sings of tearing off pores and skin, of pulling out eyes, of respiratory air deep into his soul, of his essence filling up and spilling over. The language is poetic and thought-provoking, not opaque however leaving a lot to the creativeness.
After diving into From Indian Lakes 10 tracks at a time, “The Movement” stays Head Void’s most powerfully kinetic observe, an on the spot entry in my private pantheon. I usually discover myself spinning it on repeat. However this isn’t a type of awkward situations the place one stellar observe props up an in any other case disappointing LP. In any case these years away from the From Indian Lakes moniker, Vannucchi clearly caught a wave of inspiration right here, ending up with an entrancing, rewarding physique of labor. You possibly can bounce in nearly anyplace on the tracklist and be caught up within the present.
