Album: The Index
Year: 1968
Genre: Garage Rock, Old School Psych, Do Wop
Country: U.S. (Detroit I believe)
Like said before, the internet is full of possibilities. Legions of people trolling everyone across the world, sharing pornography, and best of all, stealing music from people we don't even know. The internet can ruin peoples lives, be used to trade things illegally, and scam everyone on the planet with visions of children starving in Nigeria. As often as you find useful information, you find heaps of bullshit. You find porn even if you're not looking for it. You find disturbing images, either of the deceased or tweens taking pictures of themselves from angles that 'flatter' their mediocre features. What a glorious place. I must say though, without the internet, no one would have never discovered a sizeable chunk of the bands they listen to, or found a way to express their personalities on blogs they assume only their friends actually read. Also they never would have seen goatse.cx.
But honestly we have to hand it to the internet (and more importantly, one of my best friends), for finding treasures such as The Index. A band that hardly anyone knows anything about, except for the 300 people who luckily have a copy of this album, and the other people who took it from the guy who thankfully decided it needed to be shared. 300 physical copies of this record are in existence! Now, this blog is predominated by Shoegaze. Is this record classified as Shoegaze? No. Does it sound like Shoegaze? Absolutely not. Does it have styles that shaped Shoegaze? More than likely.
Also to destroy more of the trends on here, every record posted is from the past 4 years, with the exception of Pygmalion, which was released in 1995, so its pretty recent. Well, not really, but in comparison with this release, 16 years ago was pretty recent. 1968 was 43 years ago. This was a time when people discovered reverberation, and had tons of fun with it in the music. So really, The Index weren't terribly original, but still, they were good.
This record is quite a treasure. The album starts with a fantastic cover of 'Eight Miles High' by The Byrds. The guitars almost sound like a Lo-Fi Galaxie 500 cover, with a bassline that stays in your head for days. The next song is 'Israeli Blues'. An instrumental track, which sounds almost like Do Wop. A little more electric though, almost as if The Velvet Underground were to try to play something in that style. Honestly, The bass in this record is so memorable. The album closes with Feedback, which is well, noise. But its more controlled noise though, something like Jimi Hendrix, The Velvet Underground or maybe even Sonic Youth would try to pull off. Despite it seeming like an unattractive track to many, its definitley quite a cool thing to listen to.
This record is an essential for reverb fans, obscurity collectors, and just pure rock n' roll fans in general. It may not seem much different than what Lou Reed and his crew were doing back in that time, its definitley interesting to see what was going on as well, without the help from Andy Warhol. Is it worth the $3000 dollars the records are selling for? Probably not. Is it worth the 61Mb of space on your hard drive? Answer that yourself.
Rating: B
Tracklist:
1. Eight Miles High
2. Israeli Blues
3. John Riley
4. Turquoise Feline
5. Rainy, Starless Night
6. Fire Eyes
7. Shock Wave
8. You Keep me Hanging
9. Feedback
Link: http://www.mediafire.com/?ddwjgyrv1ct
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