Tongued Transmissions Made Unclear

Neon Indian “Fallout”

Like any genre made up by music critics, chillwave is both silly and poorly thought out AND a very useful way of categorizing an ephemeral aesthetic. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny but you see the word “chillwave” and you know exactly what the sound and look of it is, and how it connects to a specific moment that feels very innocent and optimistic from the perspective of late 2019.

Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo didn’t run away from the aesthetics that made his project one of the defining pillars of chillwave along with Washed Out and Toro y Moi, but he did do a lot to expand its expressive range and dynamic possibilities. “Fallout,” the first single released from his post-Summer of Chillwave album Era Extraña, is emotionally heavy in a way that feels very removed from the stoner vibes of Psychic Chasms, which never got much deeper than conveying ennui or a vague pensiveness. In “Fallout,” Palomo kept the thick atmosphere of his first wave of songs but applied it to a composition with a much darker palette and an overtly romantic sensibility. The song vaguely resembles Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” but its sentiment is almost the exact opposite, with him trying to convince himself to fall out of love with someone who he’s realized is all wrong for him.

The most intriguing lyric of the song is the line that gives us the best sense of who the other person is – “are you still carving out a man, is that the plan?” It seems to be the type of person who wants to “fix” a partner and make them into the kind of person they want to be with, and being on the other side of that can be quite taxing. You always feel like you’re disappointing and never good enough, or that the person you are in the moment isn’t as worth loving as a person you might never actually become. Palomo’s vocal isn’t very expressive, but it suits the dejected tone of the lyrics, and when he sings “if I could fall out of love with you” in the chorus, he sounds like someone who doesn’t believe he has the strength to break it off or become this person he’d so badly like to be for them.

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