Indian Jewelry

by Heather Phares
Crafting a dense, almost unclassifiable but often very melodic sound, Houston, TX's Indian Jewelry features the core trio of guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist Erika Thrasher, guitarist/vocalist Tex Kerschen, and drummer Rodney Rodriguez. The group was also known as Swarm of Angels, Turquoise Diamonds, Japanix, the Corpes of Waco, the Perpetual War Party Band, and NTX+Electric. The band's basic sound remained the same, however, uniting drum machines, drones, noise and other elements of experimental, psychedelic, industrial and garage rock into an intense but alluring free-form mix. The 2002 Swarm of Angels 7" Plessure was the band's recorded debut on Girlgang Records, which also released most of the output of Indian Jewelry's other incarnations. They released singles as Swarm of Angels and NTX until around 2005, when they switched to Indian Jewelry for a split single with Sugarbeats. That year, Girlgang issued the CD-R release Sangles Redux, which collected their 2002 to 2004 output. Indian Jewelry released their debut album, Invasive Exotics, in 2006 on Monitor Records, and also appeared on the Tigerbeat6 compilation Let's Lazertag Sometime that year. We Are the Wild Beast, which was originally released as a NTX + Electric album in 2003, was reissued by Tigerbeat6in early 2008. Indian Jewelry's third full-length was expected to be released by Monitor later that year.