Still Coursing Through My Veins

Neon Indian “Fallout”

Neon Indian’s first album trafficked mainly in blunted nostalgia, with fairly slight but sometimes mesmerizing tunes filtered through self-conscious faux-cassette aesthetics. “Fallout,” the first song released from his second album Era Extraña is far more mature and resonant in a way that doesn’t seem as though it could be a happy accident. There’s still a haziness to the sound, but the atmosphere is secondary to the music, which touches on the epic, melodramatic romance of a particular strain of 80s radio hit. “Fallout” has some distant echoes of tunes like Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” but the its most compelling for the way it updates the deep-voiced masculine romanticism of bands like OMD and Love and Rockets. Even compared to that stuff, Neon Indian is stoic and restrained, but there’s a genuine yearning at the core of this song. “If I could fall out love with you,” he sings, only just barely holding back the passionate love anthem buried under woozy psychedelia and emotional defense mechanisms.