Dirty Hands

“I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have dirty hands.”

So goes the mantra at the center of Indian Jewelry’s “Dirty Hands,” from their 2006 album Invasive Exotics. It may as well serve as a calling card for the band, a rotating assemblage of punks, hippies, heads, vandals, ne’er-do-wells and malcontents, who happen to play some pretty bitchin’ rock ‘n’ roll. The band are responsible for a number of well-received singles and albums, and a slew of frantic live shows, drawing from and expanding on a host of bands on the rougher side of progressive psychedelia.

Indian Jewelry has been around for about 10 years, emerging from the band Swarm of Angels in the fertile underground rock/noise/improv/whatever scene in Houston. “There are about 100 bands there that are great, of every genre,” says Indian Jeweler Brandon Davis during a phone conversation en route to New York City from Pittsburgh, on tour with founding members Tex Kerschen and Erika Thrasher.

The group performed under different names for years, most notably NTX, before finally settling on their current moniker in 2004. That’s also the year Davis moved to Chicago and Kerschen and Thrasher relocated the Indian Jewelry project to Los Angeles, where they recorded Invasive Exotics.

“Wherever Tex and Erika are, that’s where Indian Jewelry is,” Davis explains. Recently, everyone moved back to Houston. Though Kerschen and Thrasher are the core of the group, usually assisted by drummer Rodney Rodriguez and Davis, the ranks of the band are always expanding and contracting.

“We’ll often pick up people for a couple of days, and they’ll go with us on tour for a while,” says Davis. “We’re picking up a fourth member tonight. Sometimes people we’ve met at a show will join us for a while. But that doesn’t happen often and it usually doesn’t work out that well.”

During the recording sessions for their upcoming album, Free Gold, Davis says the number of people on a track could range from “one to two to 10.”  This approach to recording and playing live can seem rather casual, potentially bearing the stale whiff of collective or improv jamming, but underneath the layers of noise, distortion and percussion are honest-to-God songs. There’s plenty of room for loose interpretation and extrapolation live, but the albums reveal a solid structure to the music, especially Free Gold, which has a noticeably improved recording quality compared to earlier releases.

Davis, however, rejects the notion that the band has cleaned up or gotten more focused. “A lot of people seem surprised by how musical what we do is,” he says. “But it’s stuff we worked on a long time. We’ve always been musical. People think we’re cavemen, just up there banging on shit.”

What gives them that impression?

“Lazy journalists, and dunderheaded people in general,” Davis postulates.

The band’s reputation does precede them; most reviews and press mention their wild live performances, which include strobe lights, extended trance-inducing, percussion-heavy workouts and unabashed guitar histrionics. They’ve drawn scads of comparisons to Butthole Surfers’ infamous live shows, and occasionally people and things might get 
hurt or broken.

When Davis speaks of the band’s deceptively chaotic sound, “Going South,” the midpoint of Invasive Exotics, comes to mind. A steady, simple beat courtesy of a low-fi drum machine stays the course of the 10 minute song, augmented by occasional live percussive flourishes (i.e., somebody hitting a cymbal). A guitar rides atop it all, breaking out into labyrinthine solos here and there, while someone delivers distorted vocal 
rants throughout.

It sounds similar to something from Chrome’s first album, when they were more of a psychedelic band laying the groundwork for their machinist future. But from the opening synth figure — a somewhat beguiling childlike keyboard doodle — to the song’s exasperated winding down, it’s a cohesive, effective performance.

The remainder of the album offers further examples of the band’s structures: “Health & Wellbeing,” a droning space-rock number that sounds like a completely different band have taken over; “Partying With Jandek,” a short percussion/guitar duet that serves as an homage to Houston’s outsider-folk godfather; “Lying on the Floor,” a Thrasher-fronted junkyard electronics lament; and album-closer “Lost My Sight,” a sort of summation of all that has come before.

If Invasive Exotics can, at times, sound like listening to a label sampler rather than a cohesive album, Free Gold sounds more like a band that have locked into a sound and, over the course of an hour, are trying to perfect it. A thick layer of fuzz coats every song, incessant distorted guitars are buried in the mix, vocals are awash in reverb, and analogue synths swoosh in and out of songs like UFOs. There’s also an added layer of shoegazey pop present, best exemplified in the rare acoustic-driven tunes of “Pompeii” and “Everyday,” the latter song showcasing a multi-tracked Thrasher vocal that evokes Cass Eliot and Michelle Phillips.

There already seems to be a wider buzz about the band, and while it would be a stretch to call Free Gold accessible to most casual listeners, a recent upswing in noise-pop might be good timing for the album’s release.

The band, for their part, don’t seem to notice much of a difference in Gold’s sounds.

“We’re just doing what we’ve always done,” Davis insists.

The Knoxville shows at Pilot Light, where they’ve played a few times before, are “some of the wildest shows,” says Davis. “We’ve played with Maxi and the Pads, Divorce, Dark Meat. Usually everyone gets into it and there’s a lot of dancing. We should have a fourth member by the time we get there, maybe more, but you never know what 
might happen.”