Album Review: Grooms - Exit Index
Roughly a decade ago, my wife and I happened to be in the
car at just the right time to catch an episode of “The Local Show,” a weekly
program on 89.3 The Current that focused on—believe it or not—the local music
in and around the Twin Cities area. The guests on this episode of the show were
Vampire Hands—a relatively new, psychedelic-leaning indie rock outfit who had
just released their first full length, Virgin
Dust, American Lips.
The band themselves were charming, conversational, and funny
during the interviews, and the music was quirky and unnerving, but never
inaccessible.
Given my need for instant gratification, or at least knowing
the gratification is on its way, more than likely, after returning home, I
probably headed straight for the computer and ordered a copy of the album.
Within around two or three years after that, following the
release of two more full lengths and a split EP, the band imploded—if I recall,
one of the members moved away, and I think overall, it’s very difficult to keep
a local band, even one that was tapped to open for Wavves on a national tour,
going.
The reason that I even bring this small anecdote up is that
from the moment I began listening to Exit
Index, the new full length from Grooms, I was instantly reminded of Vampire
Hands—throughout Exit Index, the band
works to blend indie rock and dream pop with heavy bits of psychedelia thrown
in, creating a nervous, yet fun, give and take of tension and release.
Exit Index opens
with “The Director,” a slow burning rhythmic trudge filled with creeping
paranoia—building a reserved layer of tension that is never quite fully
resolved before the song ends and the band switches gears with “Horoscopes,” an
energetic turn powered by strong waves of dreamy synthesizers.
The band quickly dips right back into their swooning,
unsettling psychedelia with the crawling, shuffling “Turn Your Body,” then they
crash head first in to the bombastic, energetic “Magistrate Seeks Romance”—a
vibe the explore more in the second half on the shimmering and slithering
groove of “Dietrich” and the triumphant, enthusiastic “Softer Now.”
Exit Index concludes
with the album’s longest track—one that tries to combine all Grooms’ aesthetics;
“Thimble” finds the group creating a wistful atmosphere that is heavy on the
bass line leading the way while the guitar cascades and echoes in the
background, coming together in an In
Rainbows-era Radiohead kind of sound.
Grooms, as a band, continue to grow. Not that I’m, like, an
expert or anything. I just recently was introduced to them thanks to Alisa Rodriguez (Apollo Vermouth) who had recently repped them on social media. But in visiting
their back catalog (some of which is available via their own Bandcamp page,
while their earliest work is housed elsewhere) you can tell that there’s been a
lot of growth since their 2009 debut. From what I sampled, the most promising
of their past material is their sophomore LP, Prom—but over the course of nearly a decade, Grooms has become a
more confident band, one that finds the line between pop songwriting and
accessibility with a fearlessness when it comes to striking a specific tone and
experimenting sonically.
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