Album Review: Skrat - Design (2010)

For any of you who have read my previous gig and album reviews, you’ll know that I usually focus only on metal and its variations. So, why am now I writing an album review for Skrat, a funk rock band from Chennai? Right. Let me tell you.

Let’s go back in time for this. A few years ago, I’d gone to the Unwind Center (the only hub for live music in Chennai) for a show headlined by Chennai’s progressive metal stalwarts, NerveRek. The band that opened for NerveRek consisted of a bunch of school/college kids was playing their first show ever, in the tightly packed Unwind Center Performance Theater. If my memory serves me right, they played a couple of originals and ended off with a cover of Creed’s ‘What If’. And like every band starting out, they had their ups, and their downs. Not too many people remembered them ‘cause, of course, the mighty NerveRek was up next but I clearly remember thinking, ‘this band will go far...’ This was many years ago. 2006, maybe?

Over the years, the band practiced and they practiced hard. Blood, sweat, time and money, all spent on an impossible cause, or so they would want you believe. Band members came and went, but TT Sriram (guitars/vocals), Satish (bass guitar) and Tapass (drums/backing vocals), the 3 members who formed the essential core of the band remained and stuck it out. Along the way, they found a new guitarist in the form of Abhinav ‘Booby’ Krishnaswamy and while the band was exceptionally good even without him, it would be fitting to say that he has made all the difference.

Present Day: It’s been about 4 years since I first watched Skrat play. I’m holding in my hands, a neat little box consisting of a CD, which contains a culmination of years of hard work, experiences and influences. I put the CD in and I listen. Am I impressed? Hell yes I am! That is why I write this review; to pay my respects to a band that has stuck together through the thick and thin, and have slowly but steadily worked their way to become of the biggest and most popular rock bands in South India. Two guitarists, a bassist and a drummer, who took in their stride every bit of criticism that I’ve been slinging on their faces over the years and learnt from it to finally release an album that’s worthy of their musical prowess.

On the band’s voyage through the vast ocean of music, they’ve observed and learnt from some of the best musicians in India. The Skrat jam room has been used and abused by no less than 15 assorted bands, including the afore-mentioned NerveRek, Delhi based band Superfuzz, the short lived super-group Afterburn, Easy Street and many more. When I hear the music, I hear, not the recordings of 4 college-students-turned-musicians, but a heady aural brew of some of India’s best talent (and as you know, we’ve got loads of it).

The album starts off with ‘Soon Before I Am Dead,’ an up-tempo track with a long, extended intro. The megaphone effect on the vocals at the start is classic, and as the song burst into the chorus, you can feel the backing guitar work slowly lifting you off the ground and pushing you into an ‘arena high’, something vaguely along the lines of U2. A fantastic start to the album. After the modern and intelligently composed ‘Soon Before I Am Dead’ comes ‘Adrenaline,’ the type of song that makes you just want to let down your hair, dance and sing along to! With groovy guitar licks and a chorus that goes ‘Pump It Up, Pump It Up,’ this song displays the ‘fun’ element behind Skrat’s music. R.I.D (Robots In Disguise), song number 3 is about the Transformers. Yes, the animated-TV-series-turned-into-the-action-block-buster-movie Transformers. Not too many bands have songs based about awesomely cool killer robots, but Skrat does. The track however doesn’t live up to the awesomeness of the Autobots with the vocals being a big let down, especially at the start. The music is good and very catchy but the vocals jus don’t cut it out for me. I’d love to hear this song live to make a better judgment but from a first listen, I was kinda disappointed. After all, how can a song about the Autobots fighting in the sky and ‘shifting to another profile’ NOT be awesome?! R.I.D leads into ‘Stay Wild,’ my pick for best song off the album. This one is your typical high energy song that makes you want to pump your fist into the air and scream, Stay! Wild! every time the chorus comes along. I had to stop myself from repeatedly spinning this track so that I could go on to the rest of the album! Definitely a winner. At this point of time, ‘How’d You Do It’ comes as a very pleasant change. The well composed parts on this track reflect the maturity of the band and the changes over the years. The vocal lines are very well written, with a nice melody that lingers in your head even after the song’s finished. ‘Black Hammer Man’ passes along in the same vein as the rest of the album and gives us the title track ‘Design’. Another one of my favourites from the album. Infectious bass lines, bluesy guitar licks and good lyrics, together a winning combination! It’s got a very singsong yet serious feel to it, something I can’t really explain with words. You’ve gotta listen to appreciate it. The last track, ‘Gun Slinger’ is the only song on the album that sounds like it shouldn’t be there. That’s not to say it’s a bad song, no, not at all. The song reminds of an 80’s classic rock power ballad (think Skid Row and Guns N Roses) with a very Wild West twang to it. And you can almost never go wrong with classic rock. The experimental guitar work on this track is very well done and at almost seven-and-a-half minutes, this is the longest track on the album. The song ends in a crescendo and as the music fades away, you can see the horizon, where the land and sky meet, like the old Westerns of yore.

A special mention about the rhythm section. It’s everything you‘d want in a band; an invisible bond between the bass guitarist and the drummer that you can ‘hear’, which differentiates the amateurs from the professionals. The drumming by itself is above par and sounds exceptionally good, as is the bass playing. The guitar solos are very well composed too, making effective use of the Wah pedal, both in the traditional Hendrix style and as a RATM-esque tool to build up energy before exploding into the guitar solo.

Now, if the Skrat boys are reading this, they’ll know that I usually keep my criticism for the last. And I’m always full of it. Right, so here goes. While the recording quality is pretty good and all instruments seem to fall into their rightful places in the mix, the vocals seem a little ‘disconnected’ from the rest of the sound. Rather than blending in and actually being a part of the music, it sounds like a completely different element, a layer that doesn’t quite agree with the rest of the instruments. Not through the whole album of course. There are parts where it fits in perfectly, but there are also parts where it could’ve been much better. I also would have liked a little more variations in the vocal lines (something effective backing vocals might solve) because as the CD plays on, in the back of my head, I’m trying to figure out if the same vocal lines were repeated a couple of songs back!

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable album and comes highly recommend from me. Its not every day that a fun(k) rock band re-arranges my distorted world. Check out this band, they’re worth your time...