Pune based band, Ren’s, new EP — The Fear of Falling in Love /The Fear of Falling Apart, is described by the band as a record “Written in spurts during a summer of relative uncertainty for each member. It [the album] is a living and breathing echo of their musical influences and captures the emotional weight of losing a piece of your heart. The result is an ambitious balancing act that flits effortlessly between alt-rock, pop-punk, and hyper-pop and takes you through vignettes of rage, ecstasy, despair, and joy – tied together by a profoundly irrational and sentimental longing for a person that no longer exists.” For starters, the EP does serve just that on to your plate, for an emergent band, they really know how and what to diagnose their music as.
‘next december’, the first track on the record, is a pop-punk anthem that is supposed to be a tribute to the faces on the Mount Rushmore of the genre, particularly Fallout Boy, Jimmy Eat World, etc. It has a good guitar intro, shaped into the contours of the construction of an early 2000s headbanger of an album. Brendon D’Souza, frontman and vocalist of the band, has a good voice — the kind that you would associate with the imagined Gen-Z punk aficionado slash singer, and the range to go along with it.The second track, with a 00’s percussion line, and the production — you can tell the four piece band is going for a circular arc of progression, having and coping with soaring levels of optimism and the loss of it, a room for a party and a bathroom to compose yourself in to step back into the flashing borderline epileptic lights.
“wasted now”, the following number, and possibly the strongest one the entire project, has a fun series of vocal distortions, and an induced sort of confessed disorientation that happens when you are inebriated. The layering of Brendon’s voice over the bassline and the drums creates a sense of intoxicating burnout.The band describes the fourth track as “maybe’ picks up where things left off but almost immediately dovetails into an abject rage that’s punctuated by down-tuned guitars and a ferocious drum & bass breakbeat”, the drumming actually functions as the spinal cord of this track — while the lyrics about the inescapability of the misery the artist finds himself swamped with, the fast and, well, furious drumming ensures that your retentivity stays on the song — which a different arrangement would have endangered the song into.
The epilogue number, thrill of it, is more upbeat, self accepting. It almost has notes of 100 gecs into the pop-punk sonic identity they are going for. Ren has, in fact, great potential to veer more into hyperpop territory or infuse their alt rock tonalities with those sensibilities. Its reconciliatory, and a good ending to the composite of the record.
Overall, The Fear of Falling in Love /The Fear of Falling Apart, is a good record. It has a good aural landscape. However, there are some pitfalls. At some places, the EP maneuvers itself into dead ends of over-production which makes it sound almost unpleasant, and generic — which is a kind of branding all newer acts should try to avoid for themselves. Also, D’Souza underutilizes his voice — a few slightly stripped down numbers where one gets to hear a few more registers and the imperfections within his singing would cement him as a solid, powerful act. It is not that EP lacks vision, or creativity, or musicality, even — the problem is that in the pursuit of the perfect musical product, they have sort of hammered down on the rough edges a little too hard, pushing it into the direction of another indistinguishable new record. However — I do, sincerely believe that Ren have a good future for themselves, because the performance element of these songs are top-notch. I can see myself headbanging and cheering to these, and there is a praiseworthy amount of potential in D’Souza’s voice. What the band needs to do is to find a way to let their less sanitized, more organic emotions flow onto the drawing board for their future projects — because there are moments like that which rear their heads throughout the record. As the band ages, and they experiment with new sounds, I do see brilliant numbers coming the audience’s way — ones that have sedimented into themselves the character of some of the Indian alt-rock scene’s wonderful essence.
