WE ARE HEX, Gloom Bloom

I usually come across four types of bands: the bands that impress you with their musical technicality; the bands you feel sorry for, knowing that this is their passion but that it’s probably time for them to hang it up; the bands that get you fired up and make you want to put your fist through something; and the bands that make you want to dance. WE ARE HEX, a foursome out of Indianapolis, makes you want to dance.

Jilly Weiss, Brandon Beaver, Trevor Wathen, and Matt Hagan have thrown convention out the window with their debut full-length album, Gloom Bloom, which is an auditory assault of organic pop psychedelic-disco-noise experimentation. From the plush atmosphere of opening track “Sea Hound,” which sounds like a trippy audio warp of transmuted accordions, plucked mandolins, and moaning synths, the album builds into a lush pool of sound that leaves you unprepared for the more indie “I N D P L S.” The album then takes a decidedly retro feel with “Bottom of My Belly,” and so on and so on, with each song taking the listener in a new direction.

What’s most remarkable about the album is the live spontaneity of the recordings, due to the fact that most of the songs were done in a few takes, recorded in their living room. The retro synths the band employs and Jilly Weiss’s distinct voice have brought comparisons to bands like Joy Division, Peaches, the Cure, New Order, and even Erase Errata, but with their airy doubled vocals, stripped-down three-piece drum kit, loopy guitars, and crunchy bass, they remind me more of their experimental contemporaries TV On The Radio, with a much more retro feel and, of course, female lead vocals.

If you’ve been looking for a gem of an underground band to call your own, get into WE ARE HEX now so you can say you were into them before they went mainstream.