Everytime a band puts out a new record that has been overproduced to the pulpit, making it sound like in polishing the sheen to the utmost, all of its substance has been eroded to oblivion — something inside me withers, shrivels up, and dies.
Skrat’s new EP, Circus Act is a huge marked deviation from the same — a garage rock album that uses its natural acoustics to its soundscape’s advantage. It should not be a rarity, but the obsession with clarity, and crisp audio has unfortunately inhabited the sonosphere of Indian music so viscerally that the band’s choice of not using a metronome, relying on guitar and bass, and vocal riffs that reinstate your faith in Indian rock output.
The album is conceptual, another building block in the universe that the Chennai-based trio have been painstakingly constructing for a hot minute. In their press release, the band state, “The album tells the story of ‘Slingscot’, a highly skilled circus performer, who along with her circus crew engage in covert missions to offset the financial woes of the Circus. One of their missions ends with her being framed for the murder of their ringmaster. Eventually she is recruited by the very agent who imprisoned her to investigate and neutralise another worldly threat, simply known as the ‘Emergence’. On this mission, truths are overturned and her reality is questioned when she is captured by ‘Raptor’,commander of the armies of the fabled ‘General Bison’. The mystery of the ‘Emergence’ is finally revealed and she switches sides… forever. It is written that these events eventually lead to the ‘Great Bison Wars” — thus situating the record as a prequel in the grand narrative to Bison.
Sriram T.T., the band’s vocalist-slash-guitarist knows how to use his voice as an instrument of its own. His 2 decade long tryst with the band as an outfit manifests in the way he grants circularity to his vocal rhythm, particularly in Slingscot and Circus Act.
The latter track also has my favorite bassline, owed to Jhanu Chanthar, in the entirety of the record, and it transitions pretty well into Radicade, building up to a surmountable peak in the tracklist. Sriram, in an interview, states, “Radicade follows her leading a covert operation into enemy territory, only to discover that the emerging threat is more than just legend.”
The EP reminds me of The Venetia Fair’s 2013 album, Every Sick, Disgusting Thought We’ve Got In Our Brain, or perhaps the 2009 The Circus, there is a clear penchant for the carnivalesque on the album — borrowing notes from multiple places and maintaining a narrative familiar but not ripped off. In some places, I am reminded of the essence of a Dresden Dolls record — or perhaps multiple of them.
To summarize, Circus Act takes you places, and it acts as direction — especially for players in the rock scene. It encourages investment, and encourages worldbuilding — puts faith in rerouting albums to where most rock begins : humble rooms and garages. That is this record’s ethos, and a really, really, important one to have.
