Review Summary: Emotional AND musical sensibilities allow Indian Summer to craft an album that places the listener on a cathartic roller-coaster of abrasive highs and somber, self-reflective lows.
I have always been of the opinion that skramz’s ability to captivate an audience and hold it by the emotive jugular extends beyond abrasive instrumentation and histrionic lyricism. Indeed skramz – across nearly every movement and every ‘wave’ – instead owes its once burgeoning fan base and longtime, contemporary relevance to a touching, poignant structure. Embracing tender, soft-spoken instrumentation that is overlapped with spoken-word lyricism and 1900-something, African-American Jazz recordings, Indian Summer’s “Science 1994” is able to craft an album that beautifully displays this structure – one that encounters its possibility thanks to abrasive contrast. In opposition to its monochromatic spoken verses, “Science 1994” is able to seamlessly launch into an uncompromising tirade of reverberating cries, chaotic screams and pounding crescendos – and in doing so, offers the listener a peep into the raw and emotive world of adolescent anguish.
"1994's" brilliance is best exemplified by the various strands of narrative the pervade its nine tracks, offering the attentive listener a move away from the oft-melodramatic indulgence of Indian Summer's screamo contemporaries with lyrical impressiveness saturating murmuring vocals and arpeggiated guitar rhythm. Foremost,
Angry Son opens the lyrical storybook, impressing the tale of greed and the broken man, redeemed in his final hour, upon the listener. When returning to the enduring question of love – and its criminal partner; loss – “1994” again deserves plaudits for its attempts at subtlety,
I Think Your Train is Leaving’s minimalism confronting the loved one’s departure--raw and juvenile emotion contained in the tracks closing moments--"
bright eyes!"
It is though, this raw juvenility that often leaves “1994” floored by what the listener senses is the weight of Indian Summer's self-ascribed task--to craft an album that is purely and unashamedly emotive, dissonant and confrontational. As the album wears, Indian Summer’s push for 'screamo-esque' enthusiasm results in tracks –
Orchard and
Sugar Pill in particular – presenting noticeably blander than those at the beginning of the album. In sum, Indian Summer often run out of energy and inventiveness towards the closing stages of the album as tracks increasingly give the listener the sense that they are listening to the same song--be it
Touch the Wings of An Angel,
Truman etc.--on repeat. Soft-spoken low points increasingly drag on, whilst the previously energetic highs slump into sonic and vocal repetitiveness.
Sugar Pill unashamedly recycles a similar structure and lyrical blueprint to
I Think Your Train is Leaving as monotonous chants (
"pill don't leave me") render the closing tracks smacking of an inexperience that is spotlighted by an eagerness to write material, but an unwillingness to refine it.
Nevertheless (and banality aside) “1994” undoubtedly dishes up a slice of post-hardcore screamo at its contrasting best as thrilling energy and sustained, murmured instrumentalism interweave to create a seminal album. It remains important to consider that in a musical scene in which the weight of various important releases still weigh heavily upon the nostalgic and emotional minds of numerous listeners, “Science 1994” can claim to be one of the first and most complete. Whilst not necessarily reinventing the wheel – hell, when Indian Summer were recording, screamo’s ‘wheel’ was barely even conceived – what “Science 1994” does offer is a record that performs an inherently personal and cathartic task with relative brilliance.
