Indian Summer - Aren’t You Angel
For their third recording session, Indian Summer entered a real studio for the first time and recorded four songs, three for their self-titled EP and one for their split with Embassy. “Aren’t You Angel” begins the EP, and immediately presents the listener with the strangest and most fascinating production choice Indian Summer ever made. Like all of the songs recorded at this session, “Aren’t You Angel” begins with the sound of a Bessie Smith record playing in the studio with the band. After years of listening to this song over and over, I eventually realized that Marc Bianchi is playing guitar chords very quietly in the background as the Bessie Smith record plays, but the fact that it took me years to hear it proves just how quiet it is. The first impression I got, the first impression everyone gets, is simply of an old jazz 78 playing. “What is going on?” I remember thinking. Then Bessie Smith starts singing.
“You said you’re leaving,” she sings. “Aren’t you angel?” Adam Nanaa replies, inserting his voice into the break between Smith’s lines at the perfect volume for him to seem like he’s part of that old jazz record. “You say you’re going away,” Smith continues, and again, Nanna interjects: “Aren’t you angel?” This goes on for a few more lines, and the cumulative effect is shocking. In fact, it reminds me of a similar decision made by bands like Nation Of Ulysses and Worst Case Scenario, to include hard bop and free jazz songs on their records right alongside the chaotic hardcore that was their usual stock in trade. It’s as if all of these groups were pointing back to much earlier styles, saying, “This is what influences us. This affects what we do.” After hearing “N.O.U. Cooking With Gas,” or “If I Were A Sparrow, I’d Clip Your Wings,” I suddenly couldn’t avoid the clear influence of jazz on Nation Of Ulysses and Worst Case Scenario. The same was true of Indian Summer—hearing Bessie Smith at the beginning of one of their songs made abundantly clear just how much of their drawn-out, melodramatic sound came from the jazz torch songs of the pre-rock age. They were hearing it through a prism of frantic noise, but it was clearly affecting them. For a scene that had, only a few years ago, insisted that musical history began with the Ramones, this was paradigm-shattering stuff.
After a few moments of Adam Nanaa and Bessie Smith trading lines, bassist (and Adam’s younger brother) Seth Nanaa started to play the song’s main riff, and the rest of the band joined him. But the unconventional intricacies were not left behind when the Bessie Smith record faded out. After a driving and relatively conventional first verse in the vein of DC emocore band Hoover, the band began chugging on a single chord in much the same way they had in “Orchard.” Only now, instead of pausing for only a single beat after the chugs, the pauses were a full measure in length. If you turned up your stereo, you could hear Bianchi strumming harmonics on his guitar during those pauses, but they were so quiet I don’t even think he was playing them through his amp. My theory is that he’s killing all volume through his amp and then playing the strings with no amplification next to one of the studio’s microphones. Who knows, though. If I ever get a chance to interview the former members of Indian Summer, I’ll have a million questions, but judging by their recalcitrance when they were together, I can’t imagine I’ll ever have that chance.
Back to the song. The chugging alternated with full measures of near-silence goes on for six repetitions, just long enough for you to get the hang of what they’re doing. Then when you expect the seventh round of single-chord chugs, there’s just… nothing. Instead of chugging again, they just hold the moment of silence out for that much longer, waiting until the point when the chugs should be over before they start playing again at all. I remember driving around in the summer of 1994, the last summer I spent living at my parents’ house, blasting a crappy dub of this single from a boombox sitting on the passenger seat of my car, trying to learn the count of this part so that I could know when the parts started and ended. It took a while. Like the jazz samples at the beginning of the song, this incorporation of long stretches of silence into a song structure was not something I was used to.
Once the extended silence was over, Bianchi started strumming his guitar quietly again, with Adam Nanaa singing over it. This part isn’t that different from what Nanaa and Bianchi are doing at the beginning of the song, but without the Bessie Smith record underneath of it, it sounds completely different. Nanaa’s voice seems to be coming to us through radio static, off an old-time AM station piped through a tiny transistor radio. Bianchi’s guitar is equally affected, its quiet strums connecting with Nanaa’s voice—and the surface noise of the cheaply-pressed single, which is not black but a translucent brown color when held up to the light (the mark of a record pressed by Nashville’s United Pressing)—to create the same old-time impression that the Bessie Smith record provided at the beginning of the song. Soon enough, though, drummer Eyad Kaileh hammers on his snare twice, and the song snaps back to the present era. The band plays a slower riff here, its escalating chords heightening the sense of drama provided by Nanaa’s screams, which are still relatively low in the mix, but now understandable in a way his vocals on “Orchard” were not. For the most part, he’s just repeating the phrase that gives the song its unofficial title, but it still sounds incredibly important somehow. “Aren’t you my angel” doesn’t mean much of anything without context, but the listener’s imagination, fueled by the progressively more intense repetitions of the backing riff, can provide plenty of context even without what would typically be provided by the lyrics. The riff continues on for much longer than a typical hardcore band of the time would ever repeat anything, but with Bianchi adding octave-chord leads that provide harmonic counterpoint to what the Nanaa brothers are playing on rhythm guitar and bass, and Kaileh’s drumming growing more fevered and intense, it never gets boring.
Indian Summer’s stretching out of what could have been three-minute songs into epic length reaches its apex on the B-side of their self-titled EP, with the seven-and-a-half-minute opus generally known as “Angry Son.” This song is their true masterpiece, transforming ideas garnered from The Hated, Moss Icon, and old jazz 78s into an emotional travelogue that became the model for years of set-ending burst-into-tears moments—mostly by other, inferior bands. But it’s “Aren’t You Angel” that features the most boldly experimental template for what hardcore could be in the mid-90s. Perhaps the relative difficulty of imitating what Indian Summer did on this song has something to do with “Angry Son” being the most influential of Indian Summer’s songs; it’s easier to imitate. “Aren’t You Angel” has more ideas from which to learn, though, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is their true masterpiece after all.
