Indian Summer are a quintessential Numero Group salvage project: Toiling in obscurity, the Oakland band founded a subgenre and produced a small, influential body of work that quickly went out of print. Today their records serve as both stylistic textbooks and collector’s items. But this is the first time the esteemed archival label felt weird about the optics. “Give emo a chance,” they recently tweeted, offering a playlist of formative genre tracks that ends in 1995, the year Cap’n Jazz broke up and months after Indian Summer did the same. Giving Birth to Thunder is Indian Summer in its entirety, but it’s also the essence of an entire era where emo was still strictly post-hardcore, before it started to cross-breed with pop and assume the form that today inspires such reverent nostalgia.
Giving Birth to Thunder doesn’t unearth any new gems, as 90% of it already exists as Science 1994—an undisputed classic of second-wave emo, though nearly everything else about that 2002 anthology is up for debate. The versions available on CD and YouTube have completely different track titles than the one frontman Adam Nanaa posted on Bandcamp; those comprise a nine-word poem that inspired this collection’s name. The band was famous for declining to name any of its songs, leaving the business of titles to its fans. Setlists would read like hieroglyphs, with songs designated by guns, planes, and angels; the band members went either uncredited or by their first initials.
The idea of an actual full-length was likely anathema to the band, or maybe just an economic impossibility. Indian Summer scraped by moment to moment during their one-year existence; they played approximately 100 shows on wretched tours guided by a tattered copy of Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life, fueled by the minimal amount of fast food and stolen gas to make it to the next gig and whatever else it took to get home and cut the next track before money ran out. And then they’d do it all over again. In the liner notes, Nanaa is upfront about dollars and cents, in terms that seem stark even for 1994—a $50 bass, 30-minute sessions at a $75-per-day studio, $175 monthly rent in Emeryville split among the four members, driving 12 hours to play a gig for $20, making it from Vancouver back to the Bay with only $10 between them. Their stage setup was reliant on duct tape, cinder blocks, and a microcassette playing back a dubbed copy of a Bessie Smith record.
Smith’s voice was the binding agent on Science 1994, appearing intermittently throughout the post-hoc collection of the band’s scattered works. It’s tempting to think that Nanaa imagined future crate diggers rescuing his own band’s 7"s—enticed by the cryptic cover and overwhelmed by the pure torment in the voice—the same way he’d plucked the blues LP from an Oakland junkyard. With Indian Summer, the most pretentious explanation is usually the correct one. But not here: Like any number of rap producers around the same time, they simply liked the crackle and spectral presence—they felt it would add color, and that a 70-year old blues recording could do that is a testament to their unrelenting austerity. They wanted, Nanaa writes, to “emulate the nights in Oakland we spent fucked up and passed out with the needle dragging at the end of the LP.”
On a prior release of Science 1994, Nanaa made a similar claim, specifying, “the needle dragging on the Slint LP,” which describes a good portion of Giving Birth to Thunder in its meditative moments. It’s metal music in a literal sense—guitars strung with pipe cleaners playing barbed note clusters, splash cymbals covered in tinfoil, the dulled meat-locker reverb of “Orchard.” Traversing the quiet moments of Giving Birth to Thunder is like walking on a polluted beach. It does sound a hell of a lot like Slint, which was probably the point—Indian Summer were deadly serious young men, but also punk rock fanboys, their enterprise guided by entirely by their favorite bands, not authors, not poets, not abstract painters, not philosophical tracts. They nicked as much from Slint and Fugazi as they did from Texaco and Denny’s, seeing how much they could get away with before being caught and discarding anything that didn’t suit an immediate need.
The name Indian Summer itself was on loan from a deep cut from the Doors’ Morrison Hotel, though they took nothing else from that band. Nearly their entire identity was derived from Dischord and SST: Nanaa’s pre-Indian Summer band was named Sinker, in tribute to an Ignition 7", and he coined their last tour “Celebrated Summer” (after the Hüsker Dü song). They had principles, but no politics. “Emotional revolution. Fucking pain,” an old Sinker ad proclaimed. For his Repercussion Records imprint, “Emotional, angry, or pissed music preferred.” The Nanaa brothers and Marc Bianchi aspired to Fugazi’s democratic vocal delegation, but they foreswore call-and-response or even alternating leads; they just all crammed together behind one mic and shouted whenever they saw fit. Even their use of octaves attests to their thrift: It’s the easiest, most economic way to make a riff sound bigger than it really is, leaving no space for thirds or fourths or anything else that would complete an actual triad.
But this all worked in favor of a band that prioritized immediacy above all else. There are no builds on Giving Birth to Thunder, no clever transitions. There is nothing medium about Indian Summer. Though Nanaa described Indian Summer as “quiet thunderstorm” on his Bandcamp, their defining moments are like a flash flood—torrential, merciless, and not even remotely beautiful, mowing down everything in its path. Nanaa often reads his lyrics rather than pruning them for melodic contours, and his words are elegant in their violence: People are walking weapons in “mm.,” and “Woolworm,” alternately known as “Angry Son” or “Sleeping,” is not a biblical parable. Nanaa was abandoned by his father and he’s extremely pissed off about it. “When you start screaming ‘I am the angry son,’ it’s hard to read that any other way,” he admits in the liner notes.
There’s only one song that isn’t already available on Science 1994, a closing squall titled with three lightning bolts. The liner notes and “propaganda” included in the physical edition are the real draw here, creating context for a band who had a blast making exquisitely bleak music about not having a friend in the world. They were more expansive than their peers Antioch Arrow and Heroin, who were making primordial screamo in “white belt country” (i.e., San Diego ca. 1992), more artful than the punk that their occasional roommate David Hayes was releasing on Lookout!, more experimental than the ascetic Ebullition bands from Goleta.
Most notably, Indian Summer struck up a friendship with Cap’n Jazz through Mark Pearsall, a sonic and spiritual guide for the band and Midwest emo ambassador who ran Man With Gun, the imprint that released Shmap’n Shmazz and almost nothing else. The parallels between Cap’n Jazz and Indian Summer are unmistakable: two brothers forming a band to process the trauma of their broken homes (the Kinsellas grew up with an abusive, alcoholic father, the Nanaas’ was an absentee), self-styled weirdo punks that unwittingly defined emo for the rest of the decade and quickly called it quits after touring broke their spirits and friendships.
But otherwise, they’re distinct products of their environment: Cap’n Jazz were led by a future college professor and University of Illinois students who would soon discover post-rock, jazz, and Steve Reich. Their music was anxious but approachable and exuberant, well-suited for house parties and basements throughout the Midwest. Conversely, Nanaa was a high-school dropout who ended up in the Bay Area after three days on a Greyhound bus, and Giving Birth to Thunder is shaped by crushing poverty and omnidirectional anger. The offshoots of Cap’n Jazz shaped nearly every form of popular emo for the next 25 years, while the members of Indian Summer mostly played in even more obscure punk bands, with the exception of Bianchi, whose Her Space Holiday was something of an inverse Postal Service at their artistic peak. An instrumental version of 2003’s The Young Machines would’ve been a minor classic in the burgeoning lap-pop subgenre, but Bianchi’s off-key, beyond-TMI lyrics about his sex life and distaste for music critics (occasionally both) were more in line with The Ugly Organ and ...Is a Real Boy at the time.
Like most formative bands from emo’s first and second waves—Cap’n Jazz, Moss Icon, Rites of Spring, the Hated, Embrace—their scant output is celebrated for its purity as much as its innovation. Still, Indian Summer’s imprint is unmistakable on the thornier outgrowths of emo; as Nanaa mutters over his band’s tensile anti-grooves, he establishes a template for the literary, conceptual post-hardcore of La Dispute and Defeater. Isolate “mm.” in a petri dish and a Bay Area version of Thursday might sprout—perhaps their late-career highlight “Millimeter” isn’t a direct tribute, but “I Am the Killer” may well be. Brand New shrewdly pointed out Steve Albini’s work on In Utero and Goat as guides for their post-emo pivot on 2009’s Daisy, but that indelible trick on “Vices” that knocked everyone on their collective ass, where a gospel vinyl crumbled under a violent blitz of guitar distortion? Pretty much a verbatim rip of “Aren’t You Angel?” If the intention of Giving Birth to Thunder was to present Indian Summer as something separate from current-day emo, it only proved that the genre is right where they left it.
Buy: Rough Trade
CORRECTION: A previous version of this review attributed the inspiration of the name “Celebrated Summer” to Revolution Summer instead of Hüsker Dü.
