Indian Jewelry's de facto leader, Tex Kerschen, is a trickster of sound and word. With main creative partner and fellow multi-instrumentalist Erika Thrasher reliably abetting him, he guides the populous (but not populist) Houston ensemble through murky sonic depths, where they summon multiple iterations of studio surrealism. For Indian Jewelry, the trance is just as important as the dance.
On their fourth album, Totaled (We Are Free/Monitor), Indian Jewelry's creative core enlisted Richard Durham, Rodney Rodriguez, Mary Sharpe, and Brandon Davis to help them manifest the group's most streamlined, accessible record to date—though it likely won't be burning up any charts soon. "Oceans" starts the disc with Kerschen's eerie falsetto, Thrasher's eldritch vocal interjections, and some serpentine guitar and stolid dance beats. This song sets the tone for Totaled: Nearly every element on it sounds as if it were recorded in a cavern, shrouded in a phantasmal haze. The rest is mystery.
"Look Alive" evokes the anomic rock of Royal Trux circa Twin Infinitives filtered through a more straightforward dance sensibility. Jagged guitars slash over obese synth bass and snare drums that simulate gunshots, with Kerschen mumbling Alan Vega–esque in the background. The lysergic slouch of "Vison" furthers the louche Royal Trux angle, as Indian Jewelry strive to sexy up the void. With "Lapis Lazuli," the indistinct creepiness intensifies via stilted, lurching, gothic-dance machinations, as IJ glaze everything in gauzy distortion. "Excessive Moonlight" is Totaled's club smash: Rigid drum beats rat-a-tat into stiff, danceable patterns amid vaporous female vocals and smeared six-string radiation. It's diaphanous black tanz musik for people who wish England's Batcave—and Automatic-era Jesus and Mary Chain—were still au courant.
Things get even darker with "Diamond Things" and "Never Been Better." The former is a simulacrum of a seductive, sinuous, Siouxsie and the Banshees dance dirge while the latter is rhythmically slanted and lyrically disenchanted goth rock. "Heaven's World Destroyer" dredges Suicide's ominous, blood-red minimalism and "Touching the Roof of the Sun" scares up the ghosts of Sonic Youth's early-'80s guitars over beats that sound like coffin-lid thumps.
Totaled, however, is not without its odd deviations. The bulbous bass throb and girthful shuffle rhythm of "Parlous Siege and Chapel" made me think of T.Raumschmiere for the first time in years, and "Dog Days" closes the disc with a stately, kosmische swirl of synthesizers and leisurely, rotund drumming that recall the more majestic, meditative moments of Harmonia's Musik Von Harmonia. Overall, though, Indian Jewelry spend most of Totaled finding fresh shades of black on the rotting corpus of gothic dance rock, bringing a Texan dangerousness to its typically effete Eurotrash traits. 
