#Mandy Indiana

[postpunkindustrial]

Mandy, Indiana - seen a way

[dustedmagazine]

Ian Mathers’ 2023: J'suis fatiguée tu sais pas c'que j'suis fatiguée

a picture of Mandy, Indiana by Chris Hogge

It has been, if you’ll pardon the language, a stupid fucking year (or maybe it’s just, as Yo La Tengo correctly diagnosed, this stupid world). On any number of levels: for me, personally; in terms of international politics (although “stupid” is treating multiple ongoing genocides with a bit too much flippancy); the endless buffoonery of local politics; the people we’ve lost, even as the now pretty totally unchecked global progress of COVID thrashes peoples’ immune systems if not taking them out itself; and all of this means I barely have any energy these days to worry about our imminent environmental collapse (remember?). It’s been a grind, but as always music is one of the things that make life worthwhile, despite it all.

Even musically, I felt a bit adrift at times in 2023; one of my longstanding methods of music discovery, the esteemed group review site The Singles Jukebox, called it quits in 2022. And except for one last round of our traditional year-end Amnesty picks (where each writer gets to pick one song for coverage with none of the normal criteria for selection), that very much appeared to be that. And then a stray Discord comment late this year led to getting the band back together, and starting in late November the Jukebox has made a pretty amazing (temporary!) return. As always, that led to me encountering a ton of stuff I simply never would have heard of otherwise (and some new discoveries even slipped onto the lists below, just one more reason the practice most places have of running year end stuff early December makes me wince). It didn’t shift my existing favourites from 2023 much, nor did I expect it to, but it did make me feel like I had more context on the year as a whole, across more places and scenes and genres than I did before (but still incomplete, always incomplete).

This in turn feels tied to a change in my year-end list methodology. At this point I feel like I’m never going to settle on a consistent format forever and ever amen; different years pull different things out of me (both in terms of listening and in terms of sharing), and there’s also a bit of a pendulum-swing effect. For the past two years I’ve gone expansive, 40+ records, various other lists to get more things in. This was me chafing at (entirely self-imposed!) restrictions from years past, and it gave me a sense of freedom, even relief. I still stand by those lists (as much as I stand by any part of my past self). But this year looking at my account of what I’d listened to, realizing my shortlist was around 50 LPs and that if I was applying the kind of criteria I’d used recently I could easily include them all… I could feel myself wanting to go in the other direction. It took me a lot longer than I expected to pare that shortlist down to 20 albums (still an arbitrary number!), and I found the process oddly satisfying. Trying to decide what made those last couple of spots had me thinking harder about what I currently value and what my year has been like (and what my differing experiences with all these pieces of music were like) than I’d had to in a while.

Those longer lists have virtues this one doesn’t, of course; I have an even keener than normal feeling of leaving things out, of failing to adequately represent myself or music or… something. So while it’s true every year that there are records I loved that I don’t represent in any list, I feel the need to re-emphasize that truth here, specifically. Sometimes what made the cut over the days I spent putting this together surprised me; there are albums I wrote positive things about that I fully expected to be here that are hovering just out of sight in the 21-25 range. Some of them are represented in the accompanying list of songs that either don’t have albums or just stood out from their surroundings (and as last year I’ve tried to track down music videos, a form I still love, for all of those). From past experience, some of those standouts will wind up representing albums that, if I’d gotten more time with them this year, could have made it onto the main list. I also couldn’t let go of one of my secondary lists; I just really love EPs, and I wish more people made them (even if one of the entrants this year is long enough I’d normally consider it an album, if not for the band themselves dubbing it an EP).

As always these lists are alphabetical instead of ranked (and where I wrote about them, I’ve linked to it here); as I said, just narrowing them down was hard enough. I have no idea how to assess the relative merits of (say) L’Rain’s playfully, kaleidoscopically deep I Killed Your Dog versus a.s.o.’s self-titled, lush trip hop throwback versus the Drin’s gnomic, garage-bound bad vibes. They’re all great. But I did have two that felt like albums of my year, in different ways. The first of the National’s two 2023 records, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, was already a favourite when some of the personal stuff I alluded to above made me profoundly grateful that they’d put out this record, about mental health and the ends of things and mixed feelings, in this particular year (and then they put out a second record, which is not here because nobody gets to double dip, but it’s also good). I had a less specifically autobiographical resonance with Mandy, Indiana’s incredible debut i’ve seen a way but it did blow me away on purely sonic grounds in a way few bands have in the last decade or so. The greatness of that record to me is in more than just how stunningly different it felt the first few times I played it (although that was an experience I loved); as I said when I made their “Pinking Shears” my Amnesty pick for the Jukebox this year, it felt like a second miracle when the album did cohere into a set of songs that they wound up being some of my favourite songs of the year. Despite all the other ways I’ve been tired in 2023, it’s never been with music, and artists like the following (and the prospect of whatever I’ll encounter next year) are the reason why.

20 LPS

a.s.o. — a.s.o. (Low Lying Records)

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT — “Darling the Dawn” (Constellation)

Avalon Emerson — & the Charm (Another Dove)

Brìghde Chaimbeul — Carry Them With Us (tak:til)

Carly Rae Jepsen — The Loveliest Time (Interscope)

Chappell Roan — The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (Island)

The Drin — Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom (Feel It)

Eluvium — (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality (Temporary Residence Limited)

Ghost Marrow — earth + death (The Garotte)

The Hives — The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons (Disques Hives)

L’Rain — I Killed Your Dog (Mexican Summer)

Ladytron — Time’s Arrow (Cooking Vinyl)

Mandy, Indiana — i’ve seen a way (Fire Talk)

Mute Duo — Migrant Flocks (American Dreams)

The National — First Two Pages of Frankenstein (4AD)

Pearly Drops — A Little Disaster (Cascine)

Spanish Love Songs — No Joy (Pure Noise)

Tacoma Park — Tacoma Park (Self Released)

Tørrfall — Tørrfall (De Pene Inngang)

Yo La Tengo — This Stupid World (Matador)

5 EPS

Babygirl — Be Still My Heart (Sandlot)

Death of Heather — Forever (Big Romantic)

hkmori — forever (Self Released)

Tara Clerkin Trio — On the Turning Ground (World of Echo)

Weaklung — We Bring About Our Own Demise (Self Released)

20 MORE SONGS

100 gecs — “Hollywood Baby”

Blur — “Barbaric”

boygenius — “Not Strong Enough”

Caroline Polachek — “Dang”

Dua Lipa — “Houdini”

Eslabon Armado y Peso Pluma — "Ella Baila Sola"

Jiraya Uai & MC Tarapi — “Hoje Tem Rodeio, Baile De Favela”

Kesha — “Eat the Acid”

Lexie Liu — “delulu”

Maria BC — “Mercury”

Mitski — “My Love Mine All Mine”

Olivia Rodrigo — “bad idea right?”

Picastro — “Earthseed”

Raye ft. 070 Shake — “Escapism.”

Sho Madjozi — “Chale”

Tinashe — “Needs”

Tyla — “Water”

Troye Sivan — “Rush”

Victoria Monét — “On My Mama”

Water From Your Eyes — “Barley”

[omegaremix]

Omega Radio for May 22, 2021; #265.

Big Heet: “Turn Away” + “Screaming Head”

Bitter Branches: “Party Mode”

Heads.: “Push You Out To Sea”

Slavescene: “Shit Gait” + “Fuck Off Away From Me”

Brandy: “I’m Shipping Up To Boston”

Watcher: “Thick Neck Breeder / Mask”

Exhalants: “The Thorn You Carry In Yr Side”

Civic: “Making Time”

Abandoncy: “Let The Dead Die In Vain”

USA Nails: “A Fair Nickel” + “Little Does He Know”

Tunic: “Exhaling”

Nopes: “Amber Is The Color Of Your Alert” + “Drink The Cat”

Belk: “Japanese Gangster”

Spodee: “…Rides Again” + “Dress The Part”

Show Me The Body: “Rubberband” + “People On TV”

Pnature Walk: “Label”

Negative Space: “ - ”

Gary, Indiana: “Nike Of Samothrace” + “Alien 3”

Flat Worms: “Pearl”

Garage, noise rock, and demo volume.

[voskhozhdeniye]

A weekend gift for you! This weekend only pay what you want (over $1) for any Fire Talk digital release (excluding pre orders). Load up on the full catalog, take a chance on something new or add an old favorite to your collection. This is the best way to support independent artists but remember pay what you want doesn't mean free so pony up what you can and support good music today!  + all physical titles are 25% off with code "take25", pre orders too so now's your chance if you've been sleeping to get that Bnny bundle, new PACKS, Mandy, Indiana or Cola variant or something from the deep catalog (we hear Dehd has a new record on the way, perfect time to cop the catalog faves).

Might I suggest a favorite from last year.

[lordrahlprotects]

And again with the original destroying remix stills

[jgthirlwell]

04.23.24 Mandy Indiana at Elsewhere in Brooklyn

[underachievers-please-try-harder]

Track of the day // Mandy, Indiana - Idea is Best

[orchidblack]

[imathers]

Once again I've contributed to Julian Axelrod's Finetunes series, with the same song as my Singles Jukebox pick. You get to hear me talk about it a bit, though, and there's a lot of other good songs picked by interesting people on here. Worth a listen!

[postpunkindustrial]

Mandy, Indiana

[dustedmagazine]

Mandy, Indiana — i’ve seen a way (Fire Talk)

There are plenty of different ways for a record to be overwhelming. We sometimes talk of great pop music as undeniable, as if solid enough craft has its own kind of inexorability. There is of course pure sonic and/or conceptual extremity (heck, there’s a whole book on that if you’re interested), and in even more subjective waters we can each find our personal limits when it comes to emotional intensity. Mandy, Indiana have made an LP that has some familiarity with most of those realms, but also shows off one other particular kind of overwhelming. i’ve seen a way can seem at first both thorny and kaleidoscopic in construction, a discombobulating whirl of a record. But it has a sneaky way of reconfiguring your expectations, so that even listeners who don’t know quite what to make of it may find it evolving from patchwork to singular statement even as they’re listening.

For Anglophones, at least, there’s one immediate barrier here; although the quartet formed in Manchester, vocalist Valentine Caulfield sings entirely in her native French. The kinetic and sonic force of her vocals are present regardless of linguistic background, but translating turns up everything from a list of things men have said to her about her body (the fierce “Drag [Crashed]”) to… instructions for video game players (the stiff robo-grooves of “Injury Detail”). The rest of the band (Alex Macdougall on drums, Simon Catling on synths, Scott Fair on guitar and production) match her range and radical force. If you want to start tracking down rough genre referents for i’ve seen a way you’ll be grabbing pieces from post-punk, synthwave, industrial, noise, and more and spotwelding them together, less worried about achieving seamlessness and instead taking pride in the visible joins. Most bands don’t display the kind of range found here, for example from the seesawing, shuddering blare of “Peach Fuzz” to the fervid steamcloud ambience of “(ノ>ω<)ノ :。·:*:·゚’★,。·:*:♪·゚’☆ (Crystal Aura Redux),” let alone sequence those examples next to each other.

At times, like when the menacing, cavernous “2 Stripe” evokes a half-dub of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine or when the brief “Mosaick” overdrives vocals, cymbals, and various grinding noises into the red, it’s easy to feel in the moment like you’ve gotten a bead on what Mandy, Indiana “does.” But then they immediately pivot somewhere you might not have immediately expected (to the placid feedback howls of “Iron Maiden” and the cyberpunk motorway music of “The Driving Rain (18),” respectively). And miraculously enough these shifts always feel like they make sense, even like they’re building to something. Mandy, Indiana are still a pretty young band; 2021’s … EP was a thrilling and promising debut, and i’ve seen a way is a lot more than that. If they keep improving (and expanding) at this rate, the prospect of what that might do is almost a little scary. Overwhelming, even.

Ian Mathers

[thesinglesjukebox]

MANDY, INDIANA - "PINKING SHEARS"

Ian brings us some British-French post-punk with no Indiana involvement...

[7.40]

Ian Mathers: I don't remember what the song was, but I still remember the feeling the first time I encountered music that didn't immediately make sense to me. This isn't quite the same thing as music I find disappointing or lacklustre at first but grow to love -- a category that contains an awful lot of my favourite music, and is an endlessly renewable resource. But up until that point everything I had run into was something I immediately either liked or disliked (yr boy was a big fan of "Never Gonna Give You Up" when it was originally a hit, if that helps date me), and to hear something that was somehow neither was profoundly disturbing. As I got older and more into music, finding something that truly doesn't make sense at first has become rarer and rarer. More things get adopted into your repertoire, you have more context, and often you realize that stuff that bent your brain in your own history had plenty of antecedents that make them less singular. And that feeling... that little shock of non-recognition when you're used to recognizing so much, that little moment of "why or how did someone come up with this?" that sparks across your brain... it's like hearing about a new country when you thought you knew all of them. It's a reminder that life never settles into a comfortable box. None of the elements that Mandy, Indiana use to make their music are particularly confusing to me (hell, I even took French all through high school). But the first time I played i've seen a way, I had that feeling. These didn't feel like songs. They had elements of songs. Some like "Pinking Shears" even had choruses, relatable sentiments (who isn't tired?). They had sounds and structures I was broadly familiar with. But something about the way each track, and the album as a whole, was put together made me feel like my brain was degaussed. I spent maybe my first four listens in a rapturous quasi-panic, for the first time in years not being able to respond to a piece of music in the ways I was used to responding. I'm sure when that happens to anyone, it's not 100% inherent to the music itself. There may have been other bands who could have done this to me if the phase of the moon or my choice of lunch that day had been just right. But it felt rare and precious when I got that experience from Mandy, Indiana. And then, a second miracle: as I kept listening, "Pinking Shears" and the rest of i've seen a way resolved in my ears into just songs, the way these things always do (since it's hard to repeatedly experience the shock of the new from the same thing). And it turned out those songs were really really great. [10]

Vikram Joseph: This is so strange and addictive - a righteous French diatribe about racist border policies over a rhythmic racket and stomach-churning synths that sound like a cow in distress. From Brooklyn Vegan's English translation: "Those we bombard are told to fuck off / and then we elect bankers / and posh assholes and rentiers / and we are surprised to get fucked." I mean, yeah. Imagine how fatigué we are. Imagine how fatigué we are of it. [8]

Tim de Reuse: What's it take to go industrial in an age of digital purity? Chase the feeling of a grimy, misanthropic without actually getting any dirt under your fingernails. Meticulously ugly, to distract you from how it's actually neat and tidy. Check out the perfect knife's edge of that snare drum; check out the huge, reflective metallic object that passes for a bassline; check out the clean, papery reverb. I'd criticize it for being inauthentic if it wasn't so much more fun than the things it's ripping off. [8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Nestling its way into a sound between Filth-era Swans and the EBM of the same decade (Severed Heads, Front 242, Nitzer Ebb), "Pinking Shears" aims for a raw, cavernous sound that's more hollow than all-consuming. The playful French vocals provide an amusing contrast to all the whirring, but that's sort of it. Big synth bass, big crunch, big yawn. [5]

Micha Cavaseno: Vaguely answering a question nobody asked, which is "What if Liars were signed to Amphetamine Reptile or Skin Graft?". It's got one point, and it delivers it in perhaps the most cast-off gag and splutter of a way, before hurrying along with its day and avoiding trying to remember what color and texture of its release it was, but never quite getting rid of the taste for the next couple days. Love the clutter of the percussion sounding like a rude joke at a dance's expense, pushed aside by a belch of bullying rock. How rude. [7]

Taylor Alatorre: I always sorta felt that the world needed a Kidz Bop version of Einstürzende Neubauten. [7]

Hannah Jocelyn: I'm sorry, that percussion riff sounds like "Crack a Bottle," the vocals sound like The Google Translate Song, I can't take this seriously. That said, [6]

Oliver Maier: This is my "just say you hate fun". [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Genuinely a bad and unpleasant time in the way that most latter-generation "post punk" can only feint at. Feels much longer than 2.5 minutes, but not tediously so -- each moment of this drags you down into itself, each metallic hi-hat snap and guitar scratch a barb into exposed skin. [8]

Nortey Dowuona: Simon Catling's humming bassline shows up halfway through the song over Isaac Jones' drums, with jagged shards of guitar by Scott Fair slunk in at each interval at the end of Valentina Caulfield's chorus, punctuating them with a phlegmy shriek. Caulfield's vocals at first feel like a representation of politesse but gain an edge of menace over the crashing of the percussion. The bass presses the guitar into the margins allowing Caulfield to fill up the middle of the mix, repeating the refrain. [6]

Michael Hong: I like when that beefy fart of a bassline arrives, a really nice rejoinder for the rattling voices in your head. [6]

Brad Shoup: I love when post-punkers stomp, when they strip it down to a megalithic groove. All kinds of stuff on the ground can stick to it. The first half feels like a (bear with me) minimal, metallic go-go take on Cop Shoot Cop's "$10 Bill". To reach the more trad second half, they catapult in some streaks of noise. (This transitional part, and I take far more pleasure in hearing than saying this, sounds like "Come With Me" from the 1998 Godzilla soundtrack.) But that recedes, and Valentine Caulfield reveals the song's final form: protest rap. A [7] for the journey. [7]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: You don't need to be francophone in order to understand Mandy, Indiana's vitriol and rage. But the lyrics are worth dissecting: "Nothing makes me want to continue in the filth of our society/I don't have have any desire to wake up when we let humans die in the Mediterranean." This is a tirade about how we treat refugees, and the existential exhaustion that comes from living in a world where this feels normal. [7]

Katherine St Asaph: For months I assumed based on the name that Mandy, Indiana was an emo band. If I had known they would instead be spoken-word French over a harsh but oddly unchaotic post-punk dervish, I might have listened to the album earlier than Q4. Assumptions foil me again! [9]

Aaron Bergstrom: I did not expect the revolution to be this much fun. Embrace the chaos. Build a new world from the ashes of the old. Dance on the barricades. [9]

Claire Biddles: My face is just gasping_pikachu.jpeg the whole way through this -- yes!!! [9]

Michelle Myers: Mandy, Indiana's music makes me feel like I'm wearing a perfectly worn-in leather jacket and red lipstick that never smears, waiting in line to get into a club that I already know I'm not cool enough to get into. [6]

Kat Stevens: I'm glad there'll always be people making music that sitcom teenagers can slam their bedroom doors and stick on at high volume, to the despair of their parents. "Where did we go wrong, Adam?" "I don't know Helen, our sweet girl... it's like I don't even know her anymore. Were we too indulgent? Too strict?" "Well Adam, in retrospect maybe constantly playing The Downward Spiral to get her off to sleep while she was a baby wasn't the best idea." [7]

Alfred Soto: To play loudly and indiscriminately when holiday twaddle begins to choke you. [7]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: I am so tired, yet I cannot sleep. [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[razorsadness]

Mandy, Indiana - “The Driving Rain”