Indian Jewelry @ Rubber Gloves

My idea of psychedelic rock doesn't necessarily have much to do with 60's counterculture, San Francisco, or any other particular time, place, or sound. Of course, I realize that much of what mainstream pop culture tends to classify as "psychedelic" shares roots in a particular era and a certain pallette of sounds and attitudes, but I've always felt that bands such as Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, My Bloody Valentine and Velvet Underground were essentially psychedelic too, albeit with a much darker outlook and a completely different approach than the earlier and more well known psyche rock icons. Utilizing techniques such as repetition, sensory overload, improvisation, confrontational performances and rejection of traditional song structures, the aforementioned bands seemed to tap into the same kind of base level mood altering vibrations that Pink Floyd and 13th Floor Elevators pursued, even though their musical output was strikingly different and often in direct opposition to the psychedelic sounds of the past. The textures might be harsher and darker than those found in traditional mainstream psychedelic rock, but the often transcendent listening experience is quite similar at a basic level that encompasses much of what was revolutionary about early psychedelic rock in the first place. Namely, the possibility of significantly altering the state of mind of the listener, for better or worse.

In that sense, Indian Jewelry is truly a psychedelic group, and a damn good one at that. Their performance at Rubber Gloves last night was in many ways the best kind of slap in the face: an aggressive, unsettling and raw display of caution thrown to the wind in front of an audience that didn't seem to know how to digest what they were seeing and hearing. And you can't really blame anyone for being confused either, because what was happening on stage is almost impossible to adequately describe.

The band started the show by turning off the house lights, flicking on some strobe lights, pointing them at the audience, and pounding on a set of drums that they had set up on the floor in front of the stage. It was an ominous beginning to be sure, and it set the precise tone of the evening in about ten seconds. As the simple, monotonous tribal rhythms of the live drums pounded and stomped their way through the air, electronic beats, waves of noisy guitar and various other harsh electronic sounds began to swirl out of the band's amplifiers, creating a powerful wall of chaotic sound that was exhilarating, frightening and at times quite hard to deal with.

But as the flicker of the strobe lights and the chaos of the noise became more familiar throughout the show, a compelling cohesiveness began to creep into the band's music that hadn't initially revealed itself. Certain sounds emerged in the forefront of many of the songs and locked in with the rhythms to nearly hold the rest of it together. As guitars were soaring and feeding back, muffled vocals could be heard dancing around the rhythms, reminding listeners that human beings were in fact producing the music they were listening to. Electronic blips stood out all over the place, and sometimes the music took on a loose, dance-like quality that seemed to be fighting for attention with the band's otherworldly noise assault. There were certainly some missteps throughout the set, and there were times where it seemed that the band was sort of just losing their grip on what they were trying to do. The live drums were often a bit sparse, and sometimes the noise seemed to be just that: noise without much of a purpose. But during the many moments in which everything locked in: the drums, the cold electronics, the samples, the massive guitar bursts and the distorted, broken vocals, the band was able to crawl under the skin, play with moods and challenge the mind to dig a bit deeper into the whole experience. And although they probably have more in common with Flipper than Jefferson Airplane, Indian Jewelry's performance was an undeniably mind expanding experience that could be called psychedelic in both the most basic and most important sense of the word.