When I am sent the preview link to Champak’s debut release, A1, I am positively intrigued. The source of my curiosity, I admit, is a bit superficial — for one, I have never seen four extremely familiar faces from the independent music scene in avatars so vibrant and in-your-face quirky before. The quartet look like if the Beatles were to stumble into an ashram in Kalighat, West Bengal, instead of their emancipation hut in Hrishikesh. The album is more minimal than I initially anticipate, overrun by voice notes and recordings that are meant to simulate an intimacy for you. The idea, from what I surmise, is to let you into a room with the artists, with them tinkering away at their instruments and gadgets of intentionally eccentric sonics.
The alt rock-bedroom pop synthesis is fun, and every once in a while you hear Shoumik Biswas’ electronic dread fade into the otherwise performed cheer of each track. It is almost a facade, in a believed and consuming sense – where there is a Salman Khan-esque “Let it go na” vibe simulated with an impending, biting sense of doom giving them shoebites on their run. Daarkaak, which translates to raven from Bengali, is my favorite – possibly because of my linguistic proximity to the same, and also because the musicality reminds you of an early 2000s alt-Bangla rock style, but done more interestingly. The lyricism is almost humorously jagged, because words appear in quick succession in forms you would not usually anticipate in a Bengali sentence – but the slight dissonance with how one normally speaks works. The entire album, to me, does not let you get comfortable in your imagination of what it is going to be – but not in big, grandiose audio gestures. There is no obvious reeking desperation, the artist is not yelling : “listen to me! I am different!” at your face, instead hoping you sniff the uncommon out yourself. Daarkaak also features a stunning guitar solo, which lends it more character, and adds to the unpolished nature that the band is trying to construct for themselves.
Love Is Blind is wistful, fun, and perhaps voices the qualms of older loverboys, the kinds who have graduated from the kind of delusional expectation years in college grants you, beaten down by the precarity of the real world — a dream that is dreamt in the limitedness of being aware of “real life” and a near-hallucinogenic desire to beat it and step out of one’s own bodies into a whole new cognitive field of love and abandon. The usage of a disembodied voice, works its way into solidifying that thrill, and constructs a bridge into the outtake later : 1,2,3,4, which is also one of the more intriguing songs on the record owing to a kind of back and forth that it has built for itself. The press release tells me that the latter track is supposed to be a glimpse into the collective brain of the band, which to me, on this is trying to replicate the motions of a wanton metronome in search for pattern and breaking.
The 7 track, approximately 28 minute long album ends on Until I Find Grace, a meditative ballad referencing walking through fires, uses wind-chimey and tambourine-like sounds, and creates an air of prayer common to some salvation grounds in India where the mode of instruction is English. An air of old Osho recordings hangs around and combines with its inherent ominousness, as the crooning manifests into a spell of self-reflection and the tension slowly dissipates when the band supposedly “walks out” of the room, leaving you to bask in the smoke and fumes of the past half an hour. A1, I would say, is a moment in time – meant to be listened to in full and at once, because there are certain parts of the album which seem to lose their strength in coherence when split up. There are also some sections where one wonders if the band, because of their experience with making perfect, fine-tuned productions have imbibed a sense of self-censorship, because there are evident junctures where you can sense a feeling of erasing and correcting. The roughed up stylistic quality fluctuates, challenged by the seasoned musician’s urge to perhaps edit and perfect. However, it is also a picture-frame into the artists’ present, with moments of casual, creative untethering which I think they shall look back at for reference and reminiscence. Most importantly, there is audible comfort, in the process of creation and listening – and that is of great value, for a record this intimate in sound.
