When the music briefly explodes with rubbery percussion and flayed drones, Mandy, Indiana wordlessly suggest freedom. Delivering her incantations in a high, barbed register with hardly any lilt to her voice, she sounds like a lower-fidelity Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning.
I GET ON MY KNEES LYRICS PLUS
Atop the sixteenth-note, coldwave throb of “Alien 3,” Caulfield describes unburdening herself of someone else’s apathy: “Tu t’en fous/J’ai plus envie d’être à genoux” (“You don’t care/I won’t live on my knees anymore”). Her rapid cadence ricochets off the music to emphasize the situational terror. “J’suis une grande fille, je sais où je vais, j’me perdrai pas” (“I’m a big girl, I know where I’m going, I won’t get lost”), she says, speaking in fits and starts, as if running out of time to choose between fight or flight. Amid the formless noise and swelling synths of “Nike of Samothrace,” her adrenaline skyrockets as she attempts to dissuade a second, silent character-maybe a creepy man at last call-from following her home at night.
Much of Mandy, Indiana’s power lies in Caulfield’s shapeshifting, hammer-to-the-head vocals.
The resulting … EP is a deft balance of harsh and playful, danceable and transfixing. Drummer Liam Stewart, a former touring member of LoneLady, rounds out the band, and his percussion walks the same line between violent and groovy. Bullets fly on “ Bottle Episode” and daggers are stared on “Nike of Samothrace.” Frontperson Valentine Caulfield snarls her French-language lyrics with a tone of pent-up rage that sounds like your unnervingly quiet goth cousin finally letting loose Scott Fair’s noisy yet melodic industrial-pop production carries the percussive heft of Battles and the ear-splitting drone of HEALTH. The music of Mandy, Indiana is war all the time.