The Lindsay

Deep In The Queue

Anyway

LP+CD $13.00

09/20/2011 711447006615

AW 066

MP3 $7.92

09/20/2011 711447006615

***Even in Columbus, where it’s hard not to spit without hitting an independent musician who is carving out a luxuriously hardscrabble existence, the Lindsay are still an anomaly. They’re nowhere near as experimental or lo-fidelity driven as you’d imagine coming out of this city. In fact, of all the bands living here (of which there are quite a few), the Lindsay ply closest to actual “rock music.”

Deep in the Queue is a uniquely American album -- inventive and complex, full of sonically robust riffs and feedback, but underneath it all there’s a very terrestrial base (to suppose Dragged Out was their love letter to British nuggets). In the band’s own words it’s akin to “R.E.M. moving from Mumur to Reckoning.” I’ve never been able to hear Peter Buck in the guitars of Schmidt and Olexovitch, but the influence makes sense when you step into the homespun quality of the record. What I hear, in the epic moments of “Bang a Left” and “Power Auger,” are arena-ready blasts resembling those transcendent epiphanies that came in 10th grade, wearing a cassette of Siamese Dream thin in the dashboard deck. Or maybe even Wings in the pomp and piano that comes to the surface of finale “Don’t Get Uptight.” The Lindsay may be of the street (and in your wildest fantasies, the basement) but they shoot for the stars here – they shoot for moon landings and galaxies – and it pays off. At the heart Deep in the Queue is a tried and true guitar record. An “elpee” which boasts unwieldy bridges and zonked-out fugues as long, if not longer, as the melodic set-ups which come before them. Whether it’s post-grunge, heady psych, shoegaze, the cosmic “blues-not-blues” of the “Napkin Song” or the unlikely Wiper-esque punk charge of “I’m a Wreck,” the guitars remain the prominent voice. Then again – there’s a certain charm to the Lindsay which is singular and insulated through the gang humor and rapport between Olexovitch and Schmidt’s playing and Olexovitch and Tepper’s vocal barbs. That charm is family, and it’s better to just sit back and enjoy the chemistry…and get deep in the queue.