Neon Indian: "Deadbeat Summer"

Neon Indian, the latest solo project of Alan Palomo, seemingly has it all. Video game synthesizers? Check. Fake lo-fi muddiness? Check. Woozy echoes? Check. Organic/electronic shaker percussion? Check. An electric guitar snippet that sounds like the sax solo from “Kokomo”? Check. Otherwise, kiddie instrumentation adds some spontaneity and a gauzy atmosphere some emotional heft, but this is just polishing the turd of a deathly boring, paint-by-numbers summer jam that would plain stink of the Doobie Brothers if the sound effects were removed. We’ve heard this shtick before and better, and not just from competing modern-day dream-poppers. Take Self’s Gizmodgery from 2000, performed by Matt Mahaffey entirely with toy instruments. He crammed more inventiveness into ten seconds than Palomo can into the entirety of “Deadbeat Summer.” Instead of slyly co-opting ”What a Fool Believes”—high, jumping synth hook, falsetto interlude, insistent backbeat—Mahaffey went for the jugular with a straight-faced cover; instead of hiding every component in a miasma of distortion and filtering, Mahaffey let the listener hear each note unadorned and pick apart the arrangement unscathed, exposing both songwriting and production decisions as purely as possible. Palomo, though, is content to steal from a song that most of his audience has never heard, slap on a bit of concealing reverb, and call it a day. Once the novelty of Neon Indian’s synthetic lo-fi wears off and the crumbling edifice that holds up “Deadbeat Summer” collapses for good, all that’s left will be a weak riff on late-‘70s soft rock.