I listen to Ladyship’s debut in a car a good thousand miles away from home on a highway connecting a forest and an uninteresting city. One track in, and I know I have not landed on the wrong record, which is a definite ride — pun intended. Drinking For The First Time is a fun EP, stimulating, fresh — and gets you nodding your head along, in approval, not chagrin. The EP is sonic. Oftentimes, you find records that are more visual than sonic, and there is nothing wrong with that — in fact, it is a virtue in most cases. However, Drinking For The First Time is a sonic experience — one that layers instrumentals and vocals and arrangements and plays with music in a way that is so incredibly refreshing to hear.
There is maturity in the project, and although one does see derivative elements, one is tempted to excuse it all, considering a lot of it is in fact an articulation in the art of paying homage. While recorded in our home studio, we didn’t just chase a lo-fi sound for its own sake. We wanted the production to reflect the stories in each song—imperfect, layered, and alive with detail. “Recording this EP felt like a conversation between the past and the present,” says Abhiraj Singh Rana, the band’s guitarist. “It’s imperfect in all the right ways—alive, raw, intricately arranged, unapologetically incomparable, and full of personality” — and he is right on all accounts, the imperfections do end up adding to the character of the record, and does not constitute an excuse for lack in artistry.
The five track indie / art-rock project created by the six piece band is fun, inarguably enthusiastic, and fills me with hope about their prospects if they do decide to go with the identity that they are building for themselves in the long run. Yes Man, which the band describe as “ A genre-blurring opener that fuses elements of post rock, funk, and disco, paying homage to Bob Dylan and Talking Heads,” takes you right in. A lot of the vocal delivery on this has a Jeff Buckley-adjacent drawl, and the Talking Heads’ affiliation to chaos is distinctly visible.
Plastic Glasses is a youth idealization number cut open by conscious del, the kind you get these days from Charlie Hickey at times these days, the kind we had aplenty at different points in music history. The guitar playing is not jarring, and the song is almost a harkening to people in a similar predicament, the lyrics trying to bring about an anthem. However, there is this level of playful unseriousness to the entire song — “We blast on the scene living dangerously/Yeah go on Abhiraj and make this baddie weep/Yeah I’ll see you on IGNOU Road” — lyrics like these jump at you, and it is this unabashedness that makes the record what it is.CV Blues is another nice number, and a good phrase in itself to add to your repository when it comes to the fatigue of ambition and working forward. Some of my favorite lyrics from the whole record is on this track — “I read all the books / made no difference to the man / I did all I could / couldn’t shake the CV blues” — accompanied by a fun percussion line.
The thing about this record is that it opens up in front of you like a wide-stretched vision board, one which combines film and music references in one. AQI reminds me of one particular Pradip Kishen movie, for some reason. Reflections is more demure, and somewhat draws out a curve — the bacchanalia of drinking and induced splendor and grief fizzles out into a post-celebration fatigue — sprawling out on a floor among the streamers when everyone’s left, looking at the mop beckoning you to pick it up, something of that sort. One hears tones of VHS grunge indie, something akin to Castlebeat’s earlier discography, maybe some Astrachan and Strange Faith. The album leaves you feeling optimistic, especially after running over the regurgitated overproduced indie pop that infests the Indian music scene. Ladyship, I believe, can do good for themselves, and new Indian art rock. It is a matter of time till we watch it unfold.
