Indian Jewelry brings bold sound to The Pilot Light

By Steve Wildsmith
of The Daily Times Staff

It’s starts off with a budding cacophony of sound, a buzzsaw of feedback-drenched guitar that sounds like ghosts set free from the ancient burial ground of a 1960s hippie commune.

It builds, smoldering and billowing thick, dense musical smoke, obscuring the brain, unsettling the listener. There’s an uneasy skitter of instruments beneath the surface, crashes and tinkles and chimes that you can’t quite put a finger on, the sound of mice on the other side of the drywall, tiny paws pattering just low enough to make you think that, just maybe, you’re imagining things.

With Indian Jewelry, the Houston-based drone-rock outfit that performs tonight at The Pilot Light in Knoxville’s Old City, there’s a similar feeling to the band’s new album, “Free Gold.” The group itself is shrouded in mystery — the band’s online biography claims the members “have holed up between a private compound in Humboldt Park, Chicago and a private residence in Houston ... (putting) a light to the holes in their shoes and (setting) to work on a perfect vision of the future.” It’s cryptic, almost to the point of arrogance, but that’s not an intentional thing, Indian Jewelry member Tex Kerschen told The Daily Times this week.

The band members just refer to let the music speak for itself.

“I think that sort of privacy is just natural, because there’s really no reason to have that sort of invasive spotlight shining on you at all times when nobody gives a damn about you the rest of the year,” he said. “Three weeks before a new record comes out, everybody wants to know everything — what we had for breakfast — but then we tour, and we come home, and we go back to our jobs, so there’s no need for any of it.

“And besides, no matter what you put out there for people, they’re going to take it do with it what they want. A writer can transcribe an interview totally wrong, and then the editor will come along and chop it up, and in the end, it’s a tangled mess that’s not an accurate reflection of who we really are or what it all means.”

Just don’t mistake the band’s cryptic responses to pointless questions, to their reluctance to reveal things about themselves and their music, to arrogance. That’s not it at all, he added.

“We don’t have any grudge against humanity; on the contrary, we’re Texans, so we do believe in a certain amount of hospitality,” Kerschen said. “But don’t expect us to come to your town and regal you with good spirit, either. William Gaddis once wrote that what’s left of an artist’s personality when they get finished with their part of the work is the dregs. To us, as far as the public effort to communicate, that’s what’s left.

“Personally, for me, that’s OK, because I come from an Irish background, so I can talk to anybody for 100 hours about anything. But that doesn’t represent the band any more than you talking to a guy on the street does.”

So what’s left? The bare essentials. The band formed in 2002, went through a number incarnations and names and has counted among its members enough musicians to fill a college football team’s roster — all strings, in fact.

“We’ve got a lot of members, and they’re all essential members, but there are only a few editors,” Kerschen said. “I just like to write songs, and sometimes sing them. We write a lot of songs by nature, and the majority of the members have their own bands, ones where they’re the primary creators and producers and editor. In this one, Erika and I do a lot of the initial writing, then we play it out with everybody else so that everybody, at different points, have different roles.

“We just write constantly, and we have a lot of time and a lot of material to sit back and decide what we’re into and what works together. Any kind of ethos or aesthetic that can be perceived from that — that’s accidental. The end result is that we’re not artists, but we have a craft. We’re about improving ourselves and the world, about providing examples of self-improvement that people can see in their own realm to sort of step up their game.”