Pitchfork

Almost none of the songs on Gowns' drone-folk album Red State take place outside. The issue here isn't preference of location, but inertia: Moving becomes both physically difficult and psychologically unappealing when you're on a tremendous amount of drugs. On the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, John Darnielle explored the same drag: "When we walk out in the sunlight we tell every we know it hurts our eyes/ When the real reason we don't like it is that it makes us wonder if we're dying."

Red State is, like We Shall All Be Healed, an album about people so unbelievably narcotized that they're barely cognizant of their surroundings. But fully grasping reality isn't the goal of most vision-seekers; when Erika Anderson reads off the roll of toxins in their system on "Fargo", she's not scared or even proud, she's bemused. And when she wheezes a minute later that "The light that poured in through the window was golden" in a crappy basement room in South Dakota, well, that's her way of saying hello to heaven.

Gowns' music is serially unstable: Both Anderson and Ezra Buchla wheeze like they have knife wounds in their stomachs, the band's synth patches fail to spread into full drones, and its clattering percussion (especially on the album's centerpiece, "White Like Heaven") never settles into a groove. But the catastrophe is strategic; it accentuates a feeling of possibility-- for as often Gowns might have a wreck, they might have a revelation. In an era where indie's fetishes have been for composure, discretion, muscle, and nice shoes, Gowns' agenda-- to make a porno about confusion-- is radical.

On the process of making Red State, Anderson wrote, "When you listen you can tell that it could have only been recorded in a shit-ass meat-packing city in the Midwest where people shoot crank mixed with grape Kool-Aid and the grocery checkers don't even know what tofu is and all there is to do is get shit-faced at the bar and ask everyone how their kids are doing." And you can tell. Fragile people make bad decisions. There are places in this country cursed by boredom and bad weather. Of course, Buchla, Anderson, and drummer Corey Fogel see what they want to see (or what the drugs point their characters toward). This makes them good artists and potentially horrible journalists.

Still, for all the romance and theatricality of their visions-- drug freaks are nothing if not indulgent in their compellingly insane hunches-- Gowns' stories end up sounding like grisly reportage. Red State concludes with "Advice" and "Cherylee", the former a sampled television speaker talking about the difficulties of addiction over a slow fade of distortion and piano, the latter morphing from uncertain noise into a ballad about recovery, Anderson moaning, like she's at church, "You've gotta stare into the mirror till you name this disease/ You've gotta write down all the symptoms even though it's obscene." Television and mirrors: two of the scariest things found in almost every American home.