A Misspent Youth Revisited is a Holiday Well Spent: Catch Neon Indian at Stubbs Tonight

Jeans fitting a little tight today? No matter, it’s going to be a night for leggings and baggy sweaters at Stubbs, as Neon Indian serves up a heaping platter of homemade love songs to the fuzzed-out series of dream sequences known as the 80s.

Psychic Chasms was released just last month, and it already feels like a classic. The album marries 80s analog allure with up-to-the-minute dexterity of melodic layering, and Alan Palomo delivered it already broken in and ready to wear anytime you crave a little less focus, a little more misspent youth.

With its synth-based, beachy hooks, warped pops and gurgles, robotic vocals and Nintendo lure, Psychic Chasms reminds us just how animate cheap speakers can sound. They seem to have a life of their own, like cassette tapes. Though his lyrics are cryptic, Palomo seems to be nostalgically celebrating the lazy summer days of youth by invoking the physicality of cassettes, which can seem like little monsters with teeth and tape like guts that sometimes spill out all over the place. For most of us who grew up in the 80s, tapes have an almost physical relation to adolescence; like us, they were more than a little awkward.

But there's plenty of reason to get up and dance to Neon Indian- its sound is nostalgic, sure, but undeniably sweet. With disco-kissed psychedelic tracks whose only dealings with regret are in celebration of missed opportunities (such as the deliciously catchy end-of-the-summer lament “Should Have Taken Acid With You), Palomo’s hazy hypercolor vision fits in nicely alongside all the reminiscing that naturally accompanies the holidays.
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Neon Indian [Myspace]
The Tunnels [Myspace]