Dread Heads: Indian Jewelry

THE SOUTHWEST CAN be a creepy place.

Every other town you drive through is built around a state prison.

Stop at a gas station in, say, Bowie, Az., and it's likely that at least one of the Slurpee-nursing patrons will look they were built in Jim Henson's creature shop.

In the past Houston's Indian Jewelry have nailed this dread vibe dead on.

Records like 2006's "Invasive Exotics" used heat-warped synthesizers and junk percussion to evoke a palpable sense of Cormac McCarthy-style bleakness.

But according to singer and multi-instrumentalist Tex Kerschen, Indian Jewelry's new record, "Free Gold" (We Are Free), is a little more life affirming.

"It was conceived as a record to all of our people," he said. "'Invasive' was more of our exorcism — our getting-out-of-Texas record. It was a response to perpetual war, advanced capitalism and its various excesses, and how that affects everything personally. It was an abstraction of general dread. But we said our piece. It seems like American people are content to live in a state of constant dictatorship, so we just decided to talk about our own people."

These people are the friends that Indian Jewelry made during its extensive touring and while intermittently crashing in Chicago and L.A. for extended stays before returning home to Houston — a city that Kerschen seems to find pleasant and frustrating in equal measure.

"It might as well be the Third World as far as culture," he said. "People assume that we're the dirty suburbs of Austin. But although we [as a band] express a manifest desire to live in all places at all times that's where we return time and again."

But for all the love and hugs that are intended, "Free Gold" doesn't sound particularly friendly, though it is lighter and dreamier than the band's previous work. Everything is shrouded in delay and cheap reverb, and on songs like "Bird Is Broke (Won't Sing)" it's sometimes hard to tell what instrument you're listening to or whether or not anybody is really singing.

But this fits with Indian Jewelry's elusive MO.

When asked who is in the ever-changing band now, Kerschen's answer was ambiguous, to say the least.

"The band is pretty nebulous concept," he said. "Although we're all from Houston we have a diaspora that follows cultural oblivion — or maybe it precedes it. [We have] good friends in major cities in America. We find it possible to meet up with anybody that wants to get committed to any aspect of the band. The people who go on tour, we rehearse together but we change up what we're doing each time around — what kind of dynamics we're intending.

"It's like a spy car, where you can do the tacks, the oil slick in, or the cloud of smoke in the path of your pursuer. We can change up the overall approach we take."

» The Red & The Black, 1212 H St. NE; with True Womanhood, Tue., 9 p.m., $10; 202-399-3201.

Written by Express contributor Aaron Leitko
Photos courtesy We Are Free