Songs sometimes turn into repositories of our memories. A memorable song from another time, heard repeatedly and forgotten, often lets one relive that period when played years later.
Electric Gypsy, a Kerala-based experimental rock band, turns this idea on its head. In the band’s second album ‘Dragoons Wander at Night’, released in streaming platforms earlier this week, the band’s frontman Nahaz Ravi has written songs which are a collection of some of the memories of his formative years.
The memories are invoked not just with the lyrics, but inventively using field recorded soundscapes from Kerala’s farmlands, which are then blended with traditional country, blues and folk music. The resultant songs have the unmistakable flavour of the backwaters and paddy fields of Alappuzha, from where Nahaz hails from.
“We wanted to write an album, which would bring images of our land, when listened to with closed eyes. Field recording of natural sounds has been one of my passions. I have been regularly contributing to the free sounds database, from where I also borrow sounds submitted by other users. In this album, we have used quite a few such sounds from the fields,” says Nahaz, a doctor by profession.
Beyond the disparate memories from his childhood, the concept album has an overarching theme built around the arrival of a mysterious monster in a fictional town. As the album progresses, our understanding of the monster evolves, with the being later revealed as a loner wishing for some sort of belonging and affection. Nahaz, who is the vocalist and guitarist, first developed the story and later sat together with the band, including bass guitarist Manu Ajayan and drummer Krishnadas and jammed to musically interpret it. V.V.Sujith, who mixed and produced the album, has played the lead guitars, while Muhammed Kanz has played the keyboards, with Amata Bob doing the additional vocals and Sabarish Menon the orchestration.
The nostalgic ‘Frog catchers’, interspersed with a frog’s croaking, has Nahaz reminiscing about the time when he used to go frog hunting with his cousin brother and pet dog, with the chorus going ‘Now’s the right time little brother, Grab the torch and a wooden log, Sneak out through the back door, To the farm through the fog’. A catchy riff repeats all through ‘Farmland Blues’, which easily transports us to the middle of a paddy field in the morning. Plant-hoppers, bugs, trouts and cat fishes make their appearance in the lines.
‘The Ice Cream Seller’, which opens to an ice cream vendor’s bells in a windy landscape, is built around another personal story from Nahaz’s school days, of an ice cream seller whose life ended tragically. The album gives one the impression of Electric Gypsy being a band which clearly does not want to swim with the tide, but would instead patiently strike out its own path. The three years that they took to conceive the album is ample evidence of that.
The band, whose shows are also structured as storytelling sessions, plans to have a launch tour for the album soon.
