Sunday night at the Blue Frog saw all the scenesters back together after the winter lull of alt gigs in the city. This was the release gig of Bombay rock vets Split‘s debut (yeah, it’s taken almost as long as their cousins in Delhi took to release their debut) album Counting Perfume. A who’s-who of early noughties Bombay alt-punk scenesters were in attendance, including ennui.BOMBer and long-time Split promoter Rishu Singh, their manager Himanshu Vaswani, ex-guitarist and current Scribe frontman Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy, Goddess Gagged frontman Siddharth Basrur and a bunch of other regulars. If the Mahindra Blues Festival wasn’t dividing punters in the city, I’m pretty sure the gig would’ve seen a bigger turnout. These are people who loved our homegrown rock acts to bits, got drunk with them at cheap bars, and stuck by them when times weren’t as good as they are now. Young Bombay punksters The Lightyears Explode (who’re performing with Blek at Kino 108 on Valentine’s Day for the launch of the latter’s new EP) were also present. This was the Bombay rock scene of Razz and terrace gigs, that had now become the Bombay rock scene of B69 and Blue Frog, and call me nostalgic, but everyone seemed as youthful and eager as ever.
Split’s all-out alt attack is rarely relenting and almost always tight. With Zorran Mendonsa (who also produced the band’s album) behind the console, the Frog’s carefully treated interior sound was taking the instrumentation to stratospheric heights of alt excellence. In many ways, this was a classic Split gig. A bottle of beer broken within the first five minutes of the set and frontman Garreth D’Mello was shirtless by the end of it. The band powered through the entirety of their debut, including steamrollers ‘Holy Ghost Machine Gun’ and ‘Build (Higher)’, and songs from their earlier EP, P Is For Pig.
Split’s fight has always been with the man – the crooked politician man, the product of excessive capitalism man, the corporate suit-and-tie slave man – and they preach to fans who share the same sentiments, in their now middle-management jobs, living Bombay’s sweat and grime. This is a scene band if ever there was one, and one that’s rocking as hard now as when I-Rock was still at Rang Bhavan, where, in a daunting abundance of extreme metal bands, this quintet was belting out RATM-inspired alt and that vicious Audioslave cover. Alongside contemporaries like Zero and Helga’s Fun Castle, they were torchbearers of Bombay’s literally alternative rock scene, where bands like Rainvan and Human Abstract fell by the wayside. And they can still rock out.
I tend to sometimes be overly hyperbolic when it comes to describing quintessential scene bands, and that comes from the fact that experiencing first hand the solidarity this alternative scene has shown as it evolves has excited me and will continue to excite me endlessly. And if you can even feel a little bit of that, you can thank bands like Split (who were fucking glorious on the night) for making that happen.
Split @ Blue Frog, Mumbai
Photos by Monisha Ajgaonkar
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