Monday nights at the Echo are free, but this past Monday night was a special one because Green Day was playing downstairs, and all the bands performing had to make an allusion about it one way or another,… One of the members of Incan Abraham said Green Day was the first CD he had ever bought, but it was soon confiscated by his dad because of the word ‘fuck’ all over it. That was especially funny because Incan Abraham’s music couldn’t be more different from that of the pop-punk band, there is no sing along chorus, no anthems, and any of their complex soundcapes would be more complex to describe than the entire discography of Green Day.
Drenched in light, which was reverberating in the smog coming out the fog machines, the quartet played a series of guitar-synth stretching songs with lots of dual vocal harmonies and a sort of psychedelic dance beats haunted by distilled and buried African/tropical guitars. It was almost jazzy with watery synth, fluid guitars, omnipresent beats and beautiful but detached vocal harmonies. The songs had a lot of texture and atmosphere and the vocals had a large range, sometimes reaching a high pitch, with a constant haunting presence.
It was the second time I was seeing Incan Abraham, and surprisingly the hidden African rhythms had totally escaped me the first time whereas they seemed so obvious this time. May be I was half-asleep the first time, may be they played different songs, but this tropical fuzzy ambiance was real, and it was reminding me a little bit what Lord Huron does, whereas it was far less obvious and poppy. The band could jam too, taking long meandering escapes into dreamy-psychedelic dance synth-guitars, which were actually not short on detours.
Overall, their songs were slowly distilling a peaceful serenity, sometimes darker, other times sunnier, thanks to the emphasis on the vocal harmonies and the slow but lively and dynamic dance-y rhythms. You could probably quote many different influences – NPR named them ‘a toothsome musical smorgasbord’ for a good reason. The music was experimental, progressive pop, or whatever you want to name it, the songs were going in all directions at once while being focused,… actually quite the opposite of the songs of the band playing downstairs.