West Indian Girl - West Indian Girl

According to the press kit, West Indian Girl take their name from a brand of LSD available back in 1963. Robert James and Francis Ten are not coy about their love of recreational chemicals. Their self-titled debut is something of an attempt at updating the ideas of Woodstock Nation with sounds from Glowstick Nation. Well, all right then. I’m always up for some quality psychedelia. The good kind, of whatever vintage, takes the listener along on the trip to terra incognita; the bad sort, the kind that gives the genre the awful reputation it has in some quarters, is more like being forced to watch hour after hour of someone else’s vacation slides. So let’s see whatcha got, West Indian Girl.

I understand that the American Hallucinogen Advisory Council will be using West Indian Girl’s lead-off track, “Trip”, as the official theme song for their upcoming “Let’s Trip Tonight” advertising campaign, which replaces last year’s “Got Acid?”. And who can blame them? “Trip” is a pleasing mélange of guitar and harmonica with some nice reverb, oscillating electronics, and a voice not unlike Perry Farrell’s. (More on that last item in a little bit.) And with a chorus that goes “Slow down, you’ll be alright / It’s summertime, let’s trip tonight”…well, you can almost hear the synapses sizzling.

Next up is the track that made me want to test this thing out in the first place, “What Are You Afraid Of”. I first heard it on an Astralwerks sampler I got with my copy of The Concretes’ album*. It’s a little more, um, atmospheric, if you’ll forgive my use of that almost hopeless term. There are some great call-and-response male-female vocals on the chorus, and the guitar sound is fairly comparable to early U2. Big, cinematic, anthemic – call it what you will, it’s an earworm that will be sticking with you for the rest of the day.

So far, so good, right? Sadly, the whole affair quickly takes a turn for the self-consciously trippy. They seem to have used up all their A material early on and not been able to muster the energy to match that opening salvo. The remainder of the album is shot through with what seems to be intended as a sense of languorous, elegant wastedness. One gets the idea that a good strong breeze would blow these boys into the next county.

A large part of that is due to the lethargic, stoned-out vocals of Robert James. What starts out as a somewhat pleasing reminder of the vocal stylings of Perry Farrell soon becomes the nasal whine of the terminal space-case. The lyrics aren’t helping him, either. There’s a lot of falling and floating and drifting and “it’s OK / it’s alright” and “let it go” going on all over this thing. From “Miles From Monterey”: “On a highway, rows & rows of tired lives / Miles from Monterey / Passing cars with broken hearts / I still hear her say / I’m falling away, I’m falling in love / Come on, come on, come on, let it go / The sunlight falls from orange to red / On the road to stars that chain together / We could never see what never is”.

Article Author: bmarkey

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