The trick of From All Purity, the fifth full-length album by Chicago misanthropes Indian, is that it wields as much power from a distance as it does in close quarters. Let these six tracks rip from your stereo system of choice, take a step back, and you’ll hear a fevered, hostile trip through top-heavy doom and harsh noise. The lulled wallop of “Rhetoric of No” is tremendous, with thunder drums cracking against wide-sky riffs. The death metal shivers that erupt and dissipate throughout closer “Disambiguation” shake the frame, while the reptilian invective of founder and chief screamer Dylan O’Toole slices across any space. Now plug in headphones, and step forward into Indian’s tumult. The mountainous sludge is still there, as is the squall. But the balance has shifted, and the subtleties become evident: In “Directional”, faint, hostile harmonies crisscross with a storm of electronic viscera, sandwiched between the dual guitars that chase O’Toole’s lead and the rhythm section’s trouncing momentum. During “Rhetoric of No”, the drums trace O’Toole’s voice like a vigilante trailing a target, the rhythm emphasizing every shift the leader makes. It’s not complicated. It’s just nuanced, the condition that makes From All Purity more than a loud record with good riffs and belligerent intentions.
During their decade as a band, any change or progress with Indian could best be described as stepwise, despite rather drastic membership changes: Aside from an obvious production upgrade and enhanced self-editing, there’s little difference in style and content from 2005’s The Unquiet Sky, a ricocheting wrecking ball of feedback and distortion, and the new From All Purity. They flirted with rudimentary din then (“Shill”), again on 2008’s The Sycophant (“Allotriophagy”), and even added a member credited simply with “noise” on their most recent album, 2011’s Guiltless. On From All Purity, they are once again a quartet, with former Wolves in the Throne Room and Nachtmystium guitarist Will Lindsay re-enlisting to split guitars and vocals with O’Toole. To counterbalance the standard four-piece setup here, though, Indian recruited Mark Solotroff, the mastermind of the destructive Bloodyminded, and Sanford Parker, a producer who has long gone beyond the rote responsibility of plugging in microphones and hitting the big red button.
Their roles are most obvious on “Clarify”, a late-album showcase of sorts for Solotroff’s distorted realities. Indian generally line their riffs with cacophony; here, they invert the approach, bathing enormous amplifier growls with toxic noise that wheezes, gasps, and chokes. It’s a brilliant, caustic burst, but it’s also a smartly retroactive signpost for how the album works as a whole. After hearing “Clarify”, the depth of the rest of From All Purity becomes obvious. Yes, “Rape”, which opens the album, is a malevolent tantrum, suggesting the brittle shapes of Eyehategod and the fomenting wrath of Khanate. But Solotroff lingers just beneath the cresting guitars, feathering their feedback with static tips. And in the passing moments where the song collapses, his electronics shape a sort of Rubicon that the crew summarily dares you to cross. Solotroff appears only on those two tracks and “Directional”, but the idea remains even without him: This is highly involved and evolved doom, with layers and finesse betraying a veteran band. There’s a sustained screech just beneath “The Impetus Bleeds”, creating a sense of inescapable claustrophobia. Ron DeFries plays his bass so loudly that it sounds as though his amplifier is dying, bleeding out beneath the song. And the guitars of “Disambiguation” sometimes mimic a blizzard musically, creating a sound so thick you can’t hear or even think beyond them.
In the era of infinite and instant online content, listeners can rush to judgment with wanton speed. A new song that’s played in some remote club one night can proliferate across the internet by the next morning, with a tantalizing headline attached. Twitter answers with ad hoc ratings and analyses. That creates the pressure to change, setting up a crucible for hyperkinetic evolution that means you’re only as good as the last YouTube video someone posts of a song you’ve yet to finish. Indian, who have existed at least until now on the fringes of their peers’ rising popularity, are a testament to an older, slower mode of growth: Hide away, change slowly, and emerge eventually with something as commanding and well-crafted as From All Purity. This is an album whose every layer seems customized, whose every crease seems deliberate. That calculation doesn’t seem to have mitigated Indian’s power at all. Rather, this is the strongest they’ve ever sounded and the smartest they’ve ever sounded—a blunderbuss paired to a brain, both fully operational.
