Indigenous Robot!

Indigenous Robot

Revolting

Indigenous Robot opens its fourth album with a slow instrumental, anchored by a rudimentary guitar riff. Closed lips here is a sign of restraint, as the band bares its teeth the rest of the album.

The Denver band’s seven-song effort, Revolting, feels like vampire-haunted woods at twilight. Rock has always been at home in such a place, and Robot sounds programmed to translate its eerie seductiveness into music. The band does this with dirt-smeared guitars, thorny vocals, storm-cloud drums and ghostly synths. But for all its barbs, the message isn’t menacing. The music beckons.

A songwriting device the band has mastered is the mid-song beat switch, heard several places on Revolting, and it’s always a well-placed change of pace. “Blast Off” starts slow, as if doing a systems check, then the rockets kick in and it’s up and away. An even more effective beat switch can be heard on the track, “Like a Mouse,” which starts as a dark hole in the wall, then is suddenly sniffing out food.

The band keeps its sound grounded in distorted guitars, rock organs and propulsive drums. But it garlands the sonic landscape with strings of synths, which sounds of music that might not be entirely of this world — like where the non-violent vampires live.

Indigenous Robot helps to keep the Denver music scene bubbling. Drummer Ryan Longenecker, who sports a beard that is memorably luxurious, is the founder of Rainless Records, a nonprofit label for independent musicians. The other Robots are Elyse Elam on keys, Kyle South on guitar and vocals, and Vince Graeber on bass.

Album release show is 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 13, at Ink Lounge, 29 S. Fox St., Denver; free; indigenousrobot.bandcamp.com. The band will wrap its West Coast tour with an Oct. 25 appearance at Bart’s Record Shop on the Hill in Boulder. Watch videos from the band’s previous album, Castles, at secondstorygarage.com. - Quentin Young

AUSTIN, Texas — — Despite the sadness that lingered over South By Southwest this year, the music festival went on and Coloradans got what they went to Austin for.

For the bands, that means exposure and networking. For talent buyers, that means finding potential acts to bring home. In the enormous tide of musicians, industry people, press and fans who flood Austin for SXSW, it's both difficult to be missed and easy to miss things. The Colorado contingent was on it's "A" game.

Indigenous Robot drove down from Denver and slept in the band's van every night, mostly on the corner of Seventh and Neches Streets at the center of the action. Next year, the members of the psych-y garage rock band said, they'll save up money for a hotel, but that's the only thing they'd change.

"There's really not words for what happened," bassist Vince Graeber said. "It really is too crazy to describe in words."

Aside from playing the planned showcases, Indigenous Robot did some unexpected booking work. When the band arrived in Austin on Monday, drummer Ryan Longenecker wanted to meet the booker of the Sixth Street venue Peckerheads, where the band would be playing on Tuesday night. That's when she asked for some help.

"She said she had Saturday night open from 9 p.m. to 2 in the morning, and I told her we could book the bands, and she helped us with the venue and the PA, and it all came together," Longenecker said.
The band helped pull together a Saturday night show at Rusty's that featured Denver bands A. Tom Collins, Dirty Few, The Epilogues and The Photo Atlas, plus Japanese duo Zarigani$.

It's just one of those things that can happen at SXSW, and it's great for making connections. Over the course of the week, Indigenous Robot did plenty of that. Keys player Elyse Elam said the highlight for her was getting to see and meet bands from all over. That includes acts from Austin, New York, Portland, Japan and Denmark.

"I think that's something that we realized right away when we got there — that pretty much what South by Southwest is, is an opportunity to meet people and network, and say who you are and where you're from and what you're doing and what your passion is," guitarist and singer Kyle South said.

Bryan Lipman, an agent with Boulder-based artist booking and management company Crescendo Artists, goes to SXSW for a similar reason. The difference is he's there to strengthen relationships with people he already works with and usually communicates with only digitally. That includes people in Colorado but also from cities such as New York and Boston.

"It kind of turns us into more real people than who we imagine the people are," he said.

He's also there to represent acts such as Boulder's Grant Farm and Austin's Wood & Wire, the latter of which will be playing in Colorado over Memorial Day weekend. When Lipman isn't doing that, he's just checking out bands, which he noticed seem to be more geographically diverse this year.

"I came back with more of an inspiration and extra motivation," he said.

Meanwhile, Kendall Smith, event director of The Denver Post's Underground Music Showcase, was focused on the Reverb party at the Dirty Dog on Saturday.

"Anyone you saw on the Reverb lineup would be welcome at UMS," Smith said.

That includes locals such as Ark Life and Inner Oceans and a slew of other acts from across the country. The rest of that lineup was filled by Kishi Bashi, Kid Karate, Avi Buffalo, Breton, Stag, In The Valley Below, Wild Party and The Griswolds.

Other than that, it was business as usual. He enjoyed a Kurt Vile and thought the festival was well run, as usual, though the crowds seemed thinner to him. Like anyone else from Colorado, much of the pleasure comes simply in the climate change.

"The only thing that really stood out," he said, "was the weather was really good."

No one can bring the warmth back from Austin, but South By Southwest's effects should be lingering in the Colorado music scene until next time. - Ashley Dean

Indigenous Robot didn't waste much time in producing a followup to Fireball, the quartet's three-song EP from earlier this year. Castles plays like a natural complement to that release, with its unpredictable time signatures, surreal imagery and bizarre sound cues. But where Fireball largely stayed true to the band's self-described status as a "psychedelic garage-rock band," the five tunes on Castles hint at broader skills and deeper dimensions. Apart from fuzz-infused guitar solos on tunes like "Wonderful Life," the album moves away from a dependence on effects. Instead, the choppy guitar chords and understated keyboard effects stress substance over style. The hyper tempo of "Metal Boots" feels more like early new wave than psychedelic rock, and with its frenetic energy and constantly shifting time signatures, "Dragoon" comes off like an art-rock experiment. There's a wide musical palette here, one that goes much deeper than before. - A.H. Goldstein