SHREYA BOSE
Indie
New Delhi Blues (Avi Misra) : The eponymous track of Avi
Misra’s sophomore release is much like the city it attempts to
discuss - raucous, chaotic, ostensibly unstructured and takes
some getting used to. The album progresses in the same vein,
tainting nostalgia with the bitterness of human clarity.
Misra draws from the bite of a post-Independence Delhi,
and relates a familiar image of colonisation and corruption
choking a city that invites ire and admiration in nearly equal
measure. The song’s themselves strike as more fitting for the
stage rather than the studio, more off-Broadway than
drive-to-work.
Misra’s voice is rubbed with a sardonic rage. He qualifies
his experience with Delhi in terms of familiar icons “third-
world superpower”, “Mr. St. Stephen’s” that he excoriates
with a simmering sense of personal dilapidation. One cannot
help but detect a deepened love turned bad. The whole album
serves as the sonic inscriptions of a broken heart that was led
awry by a city that never fails to give birth to a painful story.
The musical arrangement is almost jarring. Misra’s vocals
surpass their instrumental counterparts, often making the
latter brush the realm of unnecessary. For the most part, the
songs become open storytelling sessions, reminiscent of men
singing their souls on streets in order to ease the burden of their
own existence. Musically, Misra’s work here evokes curiosity,
and if one finds his larger-than-self voice to one’s taste, one is
able to experience Delhi from the eyes of one who sought his
personal Holy Grail and only found a tainted substitute.
18
The
Score Magazine
highonscore.com
Mazedaar (Daira): The absurdity of everything has become an
easy subject for art. As life forces every individual to co-opt
and internalise multiple narratives, most of which tend to
verge on trauma, a silent schizophrenia descends upon every
day. Instead of grappling with it in agonised privacy, Daira
chooses to spit the same into the world.
Within a little more than seven minutes, the band presents
a symbolic dance of human desire and failing. Only the view
has been fractured by the immediacy of greed; “pyaar sasta
nasha hain/ yahan paisa nabi hain”. The myopia of living
by the gospel of materialism is capsuled into five words :
“Kyunki sabko chahiye thoda aur”
The video purposely utilises shoddy camerawork to perform
absurdist theatre. Spectators delight in the flailings that
have taken the place of speech. The song’s amusement at a
clearly burning world is deliciously morbid. It is hard not to
admire the tenacity with which the song insists on the revelry
inherent in things going awry.
Much like Laxmi Bomb, the video features the band show up
with war-paint to complement their macabre glee. Lush with
precise riffs that stands in stiff contrast to the incoherent
visual representation, Mazedaar advocates the emanation of
delirious giggles and a collective descent into madness, which
is about as much as one can do on their way down.