Philadelphia Weekly

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Indian Jewelry are four supermodels from Houston who make drone-happy soundscapes of swelling noise and rhythm that can be favorably compared to Butthole Surfers, Suicide, the Fall, Royal Trux and Throbbing Gristle.

Watery Love are a gang of Philly-based misfits who play plodding, simplistic and fuzzy punk screeds.

Both bands play Little Bar this week (Sunday and Monday, respectively), a new-ish spot in Bella Vista owned by Michael D’Addesi, who hopes to see the former sports bar become a cultural center that promotes and supports local art.

We started a couple sentences and asked Indian Jewelry and Watery Love’s singer/guitarist Richie Charles to finish them. We call it Fill in the Blanks. Enjoy.

Indian Jewelry

It bothers us when people compare us to ... “every two-bit Native American named band that has sprung up in our shadows. Petty, but true.”

It thrills us when people compare us to ... “any of the awesome bands that did it for us when we were kids. The obvious ones people say are Buttholes, Suicide, the Fall, Royal Trux and Throbbing Gristle. When King Coffey [of Butthole Surfers] came up to us at a house party years ago and told us he dug what we were doing, we knew we were on the right track. Our biggest thrill was when Longmont Potion Castle used some of our music as background noise on a CD.”

We’re bonafide road dawgs, touring all the time. One of the most surreal things we’ve seen in our travels is ... “the night Hunter Thompson died we stayed with a dude in Phoenix who claimed to be a computer programmer, yet he had to jump the gate to get in to the complex where he lived in an apartment with no furniture at all, just a stack of gay porn in the bathroom and a huge sack of weed on his kitchen counter. We woke up in the middle of the night and he was standing over us holding a butter knife. We were rolling with our dog Rebel, and she was tough, so we fell back to sleep and snuck out in the morning. Also, a few years later while we were driving through Alabama, we saw a full-grown cougar run across the interstate in broad daylight.”

Pitchfork, in a review of our album Free Gold, said we need better drugs. To that we say ... “we don’t look to the fake underground for personal or professional advice.”

Speaking of drugs, have you tried ... “sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep of the dead. After a while everything else on the buffet starts to look rotten.”

People can hate on our hometown, Houston, all they want. But a few great things they don’t know about it are ... “cheap Mexican food, cheap Vietnamese food, cheap Palestinian/Lebanese/Turkish/Greek food, wild alligators sprawling on the footpaths at Brazos Bend State Park, the programming at the Station Art Museum is years ahead of the game, and that things get weird every night of the week at Notsuoh, the run-down, all-night homeless-inclusive beatnik cafe in the middle of the strip of yuppie bars and rap clubs downtown.”

Time ... “times are tough, got us drinking out of fucked-up cups. We’re still counting on Y2K to wipe out our bad credit.”

Watery Love

The best album of the year so far is totally ... “ 7 by Puerto Rico Flowers. It’s elegantly gorgeous, stoney dark music made by and for the type of person who thinks black roses make a nice gift. Just about the most sincere thing I can stomach.”

The thing you wouldn’t know about our drummer, Meg Baird, by listening to her phenomenal album Seasons On Earth is ... “that she’s not just the only one of us who can drive stick, she’s also got the most wicked jumpshot in all of Watery Love.”

We can’t stand it when ... “the evening sun goes down.”

Titus Andronicus just got pissy with Kurt Vile on Twitter for allowing “Baby’s Arms” to be used in a Bank of America commercial. As a personal friend of Kurt’s we feel ... “that the Phillies play at Citizen’s Bank Park, the Eagles play at Lincoln Financial Field and Black Sabbath have played at the Susquehanna Bank Center. The other members of Watery Love and I eagerly await our piece of the pie.”

On our next album we ... “will feel a swell of pride and a sense of accomplishment. An entire album is a lot of songs. I hope it’s a good one.”

Get the fuck outta here with ... “all the applause at the end of our set. It’s deafening and we rarely give an encore.”