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Maybe it’s the emotional potency of the words. Maybe his history as a drummer has given him an ear that is finely tuned to subtleties of articulation. Maybe the crass impersonality of the big city (New York) corrupted his eager, malleable midwestern soul with jaded worldliness. Whatever the reason, one thing is for sure: JM Airis can deliver a lyric like he means it. His debut album Indian Summer – released on the Minneapolis based record label Gross National Product – is a tasteful collection of harmonically inventive down-tempo country/western songs that rock slow and deep, like the pulse of the earth.
Throughout Indian Summer, Airis proves himself to be a gifted orchestrator, creating textures that range from simple vocals/accompaniment to architectonic layering of sheets of atmosphere that, given the proper set of head phones, threaten to swallow the listener whole. This diversity of texture is especially impressive given that Airis recorded album entirely in analogue.
The first track “Let it Come” is a bit of an anomaly on the record- its highly dissonant and all in all more experimental sounding. Musically, as an opener, it’s misleading in that it might give a different impression of Indian Summer’s overall accessibility which I would otherwise rate very high. But thematically it precedes the rest of the album very well. The lyrics, pointing toward some kind of pending revelatory occurrence, combined with the repetitive mechanistic pattern sounding insistently in the middle ground create the feeling that one is descending into a kind of industrial dystopia. This mood persists throughout the rest of the record, in the soberly delivered fatalism of the lyrics and the dense clouds of guitar fuzz and shimmering cymbals that drift through the music like a fog.
If the opening track leads us into the doomy dirge of a decaying cityscape, the final track portrays a clearing of the scenery. The dense textures that had formulated a thick cloud cover of unease over much of the record suddenly lift. The resulting stillness amplifies the ghostly echo of reverb that trails Airis’s voice, and his words seem to disappear into the empty space. The effect is haunting, but also hopeful. As if Airis has found a way to distance himself from the fog of unease. And from this distance, he is able to look back and conclude the “Love is all Around.”
- Caleb (May 12, 2011)
A note to all of our hometown readers: Indian Summer, along with all of the latest releases from Minneapolis-based record label, Totally Gross National Product, is now available at our ridiculously good local record store, Revival Records!
