Rocking in the Free World

Sunday, the 20th September saw me visit another Xtreme Sports Bar, this time around in Karkhana, Secundrabad. This bar was significantly more spacious and looked like it could hold more people than the one at Banjara Hills, but the latter was split into two levels and I didn’t really get a chance to head to the second level when I had been there because it was so frigging crowded.

There is no point in my being redundant and writing about stuff similar to last time, so I’ll probably just make a small note of the bands and some of the fun experiences that marked the second leg of the battle of the bands.

I was accompanied by Dhawal Sharma and Vaibhav Aparimit (yeah, I was WTFing at his last name for quite some time myself when I first met him) who I introduced as my cousins from my Dad’s and Mum’s side respectively, just for kicks. Eight bands were slated to play that evening and consequently, the show started earlier than it did the previous sunday.

Hyderabad’s rock scene is not as evolved as that of Bangalore’s, and this was suitably evinced by the fact that the crowds were still caught up on 80′s popular songs that the bands willingly covered. I heard ‘Sultans of Swing’ twice and heard ‘Get Over It’ by the Eagles and all enough number of times to last me a lifetime.

However, the organizers had specifically asked for the bands to play covers and add a Hindi song to their repertiore if possible so as to keep the crowds going. After all, they’re more concerned about the bottom line at the end of the day. (Look Ma, MBA-types lingo!Whee!)

Defying this rule was a tight brutal death metal band named ‘Shock Therapy’ who came on stage and played one killer number. The vocalist looked like a Somalian and was this short, puny fellow with his head tonsured, and when he opened his mouth and began singing, the whole crowd was shocked and awed by the growls and snarls our man belted out.

After they were asked to evict the stage, I spoke to them and asked them to get in touch with me so I could put their URL out for those interested to listen to them. I know a few people back in Bangalore who’d be pleased as punch with their style of music.

Aside from this band, the two bands of note for me were ‘Realms’ and ‘Lost in Translation‘. The former band played a couple of tracks with some interesting twin-lead harmonies, with a tight drummer and bassist in tow to stand aside starkly from the classic rock playing bands. Thankfully they had no covers, but for the sake of the competition, it would make sense for them to appease the other judges and the crowd and dish out a couple next sunday.

‘Lost in Translation’ on the other hand played a couple of covers, executed them perfectly and ended their set with a song of their own, and all in all were definitely the tighest band for the evening.

Some of the other bands that played were ‘Anarchy’, ‘Peace Frog’, ‘Power Psyche’, ‘Almost September’ (whose bassist killed it brilliantly with his Fender bass) and one more band whose name I don’t remember now.

The popular Hyderabad based band, ‘Joshua Tree‘ (flickr photos, couldn’t find any other lnk) also judged the competition and ended the evening with a super set, albeit one full of covers including three Megadeth songs (for which they should’ve used slightly crunchier patches for guitars), ‘Black Velvet’ , ‘Come Together’ and so on.

I usually play the role of Silent Bob and let the other judges do the talking, but yesterday I did tell one of the vocalists to keep a constant distance between him and the mic so that the sound would be consistent. Hardly any criticism, just some helpful feedback.

27th September, three days before finals, the semi-finals of the Battle of the Bands takes place at Xtreme Sports Bar in Banjara Hills. Come early if you intend to show up, the place is smaller, is located in a bustling part of Hyderabad and seats will fill up sooner. See you there!

Now that I’ve read the post, it looks like half a page of scribbled lines, but given paucity of time and lack of sleep, I’ll refrain from editing the post for once.