Reasons abound as to why I should find indie rock duo The Color Industry strangely familiar. The band, which consists of Matt Chatham (vocals, drums, guitars) and TMT’s Collin Anderson (keyboards, bass), is based out of Ithaca, New York, close enough to where I mostly grew up in the western New York area; their music reminds me of bands I heard while in middle or high school in the mid- to late-90s, especially on local college radio; and the band’s debut album, entitled Quotidian, is thematically concerned with the life experiences of youth, angst, and growing up. Yet for all of this, The Color Industry’s music ultimately has a uniquely evasive, hard-to-place quality about it.
This indefinable quality couldn’t just be relegated to the eclecticism of their musical influences — which is, nonetheless, deserving of note — but also to the fact that they recorded Quotidian over the course of several years and in different locations (throughout New York). Whatever spatio-temporal configuration in which either member of The Color Industry dwelled perhaps influenced them in some way in the process. What results is a slightly disjointed and disordered body of music, but one that remains coherent and compelling, a genuinely autobiographical reflection and expression of both Chatham and Anderson, particularly throughout the last several years of their lives. To be more specific, all that time and moving around may have affected the music such that Quotidian has a sound that feels oddly ‘out of time.’
There are, to be sure, several factors responsible for Quotidian’s curious temporal indeterminacy, but the album’s production is one of the most obvious. Throughout, Chatham and Anderson utilize a lo-fi sound aesthetic, but they never make it the focus of the songs themselves; instead it’s utilized in the service of — in my interpretation, at least — attempting to express the thematic content of the music. To Chatham and Anderson’s credit, it is successful in doing so, lending the music a homemade, earthy quality. As a result, Quotidian is effective in evoking all things we properly and commonly deem familiar — the household and domestic life, one’s friends, relationships, the neighborhood. Yet its sound is relatively unrecognizable and incomparable to other forms of so-called lo-fi music. It’s as if the music exists outside the temporal spectrum of the genre, and it most definitely has an effect on how its ‘familiar’ themes are received.
Apart from the lo-fi aesthetic, the songs on Quotidian also display unique, complex experimentation and spontaneity in their compositions, further obscuring any straightforwardness. For lack of a better description, the music could be identified as “experimental” indie rock. “Oxytocin,” the album’s opening track, progresses unpredictably: clear, patiently foreboding guitars are abruptly cut off by a lone, timid xylophone, which provides a transition into a combination of vocals, drums, and guitars, all filtered through a bass-y distortion. The third track, “Thoughts,” forcibly mixes a sensitive and affectedly sung vocal melody with thick, sludgy guitar noise distortion, until the entire mix is subverted by a grinding wall of noise that closes out the song with a lengthy, cryptic finale. “Elroy” stands out for being one of the album’s most conventional, yet it still exhibits the experimentation characteristic of Quotidian’s other songs. The track could be a compellingly dramatic, melancholic Anglo-Americana melody by way of late 60s rock, though Chatham and Anderson outfit it elaborately with intricately layered guitars, both acoustic and electric.
Quotidian ends with haunting closer “Dust,” perhaps its strongest track and an appropriate coda to the album and the characteristically indefinable nature of its sound. The song starts off with somber acoustic guitars accompanied by sparse electric guitar drones, establishing a fitting tone for Chatham’s weary, evocative words: “I know I never listened to that tape you gave me/ I can say I tried/ I got through the first song before I quit on you/ And I know that you saw something in my eyes last night/ You never tried to understand or question so why should I?/ Why should I?” The personal, intimate lyrics, however, are soon followed by a return to instrumentation, where slightly out-of-tune acoustic guitars and a softer, hazier electric guitar drone add a dimension of the strange and uncertain, rendering — at least partially — the familiarity of the lyrics and the song as a whole unfamiliar. Indeed, “Dust” seems to most clearly articulate the very contrast and tensions found throughout Quotidian, those between the familiar and the strange. This is, after all, not only what prevents the album from becoming just another document of the life experiences of growing up, but also what gives it that ‘unique, indefinable’ quality.
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