After seven years of reading Indian band bios, I’ve gotten pretty good at guessing what a band is going to sound like from how they look at themselves. One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever a band claims that their music is impossible to categorize, what they really mean is that it’s absolutely generic with a few eclectic musical flourishes sprinkled on top as garnish. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but it’s true for most bands, including New Delhi sextet Fire Exit. Their bio notes that their music combines rock, jazz, metal and psychedelia, but this just sets you up for disappointment. These guys have been around for a few of years, and their song ‘MML’ was one of the more exciting tracks to appear on the Stupid Ditties 2 compilation back in 2008. They released their six track debut EP OK Bye (stream here) earlier this year, and we decided to give it a spin.
The band’s basic sound is generic alt-rock, though they make occasional forays into progressive metal and Indian fusion. The use of the tabla as backing percussion on ‘Poison Ivy’ is an innovative idea, but it’s executed without much care or conviction. The interplay between the bass and the tabla gives the track a unique feel, but the band chooses to bury it under unconvincing guitar riffs stolen from ’90s alt-metal. It also features a god-awful distortion tone (yes, I know I keep going on about this) that no self-respecting producer would have allowed on an otherwise decent sounding record. The tabla gets another chance to shine on ‘Vacuum’, with the Indian classical bass groove complementing its warm percussion sound (the approach is repeated on ‘MML’), but once again the band shies away from giving it the focus it deserves.
The rhythm section of Aditya Roy and Tejasvi Agarwal is pretty effective, but the guitarists are just phoning it in on this record. Subadhra Kamath’s voice is powerful and emotive, but it’s hardly distinctive. Nevertheless, she does a pretty good job and there are plenty of vocal melodies on here that will catch your fancy. Her best performance is on the stand-out track ‘Heroes’, with the slight quaver in her voice adding a lot of character to her vocal delivery. The track also has a maddeningly familiar guitar riff, but the songwriting is good enough to pull it off. On the other hand, ‘Spark’ is one of the most uninspired tracks I’ve heard. It starts with a bass line that vaguely reminds you of Zero, but soon morphs into seven minutes of unnecessary Porcupine Tree worship without the catchiness or songwriting chops of either band.
The main lyrical themes on the album are dreams and lies, as Subadhra explores a world of darkness and broken dreams but retains the faith that everything will turn out all right. On ‘Vacuum’, she evokes wonderful imagery with the line, “Scare crows stand alone and call/ They call out to your fragile heart”. But for the most part, her lyrics are characterised by alt-rock cheesiness, such as the chorus to Poison Ivy, “Now I’m falling down again/ I see you breaking into pieces” and, “I’ll be waiting for the light here/ And I’ll be pleading for the clouds to clear” on ‘Waiting For’.
Fire Exit is a band that’s hit on a great idea, but lacks the courage and the vision to execute it properly. OK Bye shows potential, but they’re going to need to do a lot more work before they’re a polished product.
Indiecision: C+
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