Back in 1981, when the CMJ Music Marathon started, 1960's garage psychedelia was already an antique genre being enthusiastically revived by fuzz-tone-loving aficionados. I can't think of a CMJ (or for that matter South By Southwest) where I haven't thoroughly enjoyed some band plunging into the hopped-up stomps, overamped blues riffs, drones and freakouts so fondly remembered by bands that have been, in more recent years, too young to have possibly witnessed the original excesses.
These are bands that know they're unlikely to be broadcast on any commercial radio station or to reap any pop windfall; they're in it for the performances, wowing live audiences at events like CMJ and (if booking agents are listening) going on to barnstorm the college and indie circuit for as long as their stamina holds out. It's a feedback-laced version of art for art's sake.
Along came another one of those bands this year, Wooden Indian Burial Ground, a guitar-bass-drums band from P ortland, Ore., that's particularly molten. (It's a four-piece, including a keyboardist, on the album it will release on CD on Oct. 30.)
Melody isn't the priority when Justin Fowler, on guitar and vocals, leads the band into its jams. As the rhythm section bears down splashily on whatever riff drives the song, Mr. Fowler pushes surf-guitar techniques - glissando, string-bending, tremolo strumming - toward their noisy, textural extremes, or he makes swoopy sounds from a low-tech analogue synthesizer that a friend built inside a beat-up bit of luggage from a thrift shop. Reverb - too much of it - garbles the vocals, but the point of the songs is the way they ride their rudimentary riffs toward euphoric dementia. That has to be its own reward.
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