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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2009 > November > 03 > Entry
Fun Fun Fun Fest preview: Alan Palomo
Both of Alan Palomo’s bands, Vega and Neon Indian, will perform Saturday during Fun Fun Fun Fest, with about three hours between sets. It’s a tall order for Palomo, 21, who doesn’t have much experience performing with either band, but he’s not overly concerned.
“It’s going to be like one extended set with a break in between,” he says. “I’m more curious than worried. We’re trying to brainstorm a little to make the sets seem as different as possible.”
Though casual listeners might not notice much difference between the groups, both of which rely fairly heavily on electronic effects, there are differences. Vega, which Palomo says is mostly named for the star (and not for Alan Vega of the band Suicide, although he is a fan), is the more danceable of the two, pulling from disco in service of a sound that might appeal to fans of Cut Copy and Passion Pit (he has remixed the Boston band).
Neon Indian, on the other hand, is a more psychedelic affair, which Palomo describes as an “audio documentary,” where fleeting samples of random sounds (car radios, background noise) underscore lyrics that describe moments from his teenage years.
Of the two, Neon Indian is getting more attention at the moment, with a well-reviewed debut full-length, “Psychic Chasms,” out now on Lefse. Palomo also caught a big break during the Austin City Limits Music Festival, when he filled in for Raveonettes after the band was unable to get out of Denmark, although it didn’t quite work out as well as he would have liked. “From what I read, everyone still thought we were the Raveonettes, which kind of sucks, but it was still pretty surreal and amazing to be up there and see such a large audience of people,” he says.
It’s all happened very quickly for the Mexican-born musician (his family moved to Texas when he was 6), who moved to Austin last year after deciding to take time off from film school at the University of North Texas in Denton, where he fronted a third band, Ghosthustler. Though his father, Jorge Palomo, is a musician who enjoyed a stint as a pop star in Mexico during the ’70s, Alan says that he didn’t become interested in making music until high school.
That is not to say that Palomo isn’t influenced by his father; he even sampled him on “Psychic Chasms.” Despite the fact their styles of music don’t have too much in common, the father and son have been able to find some common ground when it comes to the music business. “The more stories I tell him about being on the road the more parallels we seem to find between the experiences he’s had in music and the experiences I’m having in music,” Palomo says.
Vega plays at 3:35 p.m. on the Blue stage. Neon Indian follows three hours later at 6:35 p.m. on the Blue stage.
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