I Fucked Up The Order of This By Misremembering My Own Damn List. . The 9th Best Album of 2009: Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms

It's fitting that a decade that (sort of) began with Daft Punk's Discovery would end with a record like Psychic Chasms, if only to illustrate how little things actually change. Neon Indian is, at its core, Daft Punk with a Wavves-esque lo-fi aesthetic applied to it. Its built on the same obscure samples, the same 4/4 beats. In the 9 years since Discovery, the technological means have increased to the point where any garage band fiddling around with Reason could create a reasonable facsimile of Daft Punk's sound--but Psychic Chasms sounds like a garage band is actually performing it.

Make no mistake, this is not a timeless album--it's the polar opposite. Neon Indian is a band that is wholly representative of the time in which it was released. This is recession dance music. Music for a time where the industry is so fucked up that its biggest stars are (gasp) songwriters!* and shouldabeen one-hit-wonders like Flo Rida (I know, right?) have multiple number 1 hits. It's all shit. This is no time for glossy-ass crossover hipster electro-pop; this is a time for slightly-more-lo-fi-than-usual crossover hipster electro-pop!

It's easy to rag on the whole endeavor, especially considering it's always referred to as "Alan Palomo's collaboration with visual artist [so and so]." And since that sounds really pretentious, and since the music has been unfortunately dubbed "chillwave" by the kinds of people who catalog new music by inexplicable subgenres, people rag on it a lot. Again, this is why Psychic Chasms is just oh-so 2009. 2009, when "hip" people listened to a style of music called "chillwave"! It's like looking at a photo of yourself when you had shoulder-length hair; sure it looks stupid now, but it was a lot of fun at the time.

And oh yeah, there's some really great songs on the record. But who cares about those? Any idiot can listen to songs--you need me to provide them with some sort of cultural relevance. Right? "Should Have Taken Acid With You" is my fucking ringtone. I have exemplary taste. C'mon.

Psychic Chasms by Neon Indian, the ninth best album of 2009!

---

*in reference to Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, who, if it were '99, would be relegated to passing off the hit singles they write to Christina Aguilera or something. 2009 popstars are sorta like real musicians. Weird, huh?