By Jonny Bakes
You could perhaps be forgiven for not immediately considering India as a metal-loving nation, as there isn’t a huge amount of Indian metal bands making waves over the shores of the Über Kingdom, other than perhaps Bloodywood. However, there is a new record label from Bengaluru, Unherd Music, that is setting out to bring out the best underground and experimental rock and metal that India has to offer. The very first release from this label is from the talented stoner-rock duo Diarchy with their follow-up to 2017’s ‘Here Lost We Lie’, and I’m fortunate enough to have a copy to get stuck into.
I seem to be coming across quite a few stoner-rock two-piece acts at the moment, or maybe it’s just that I’m noticing them more? The genre is quite well suited to acts of this size though, so it makes sense that more are cropping up. With the music heavily rooted in blues it is, by its very nature, relatively simple in construction but by no means does this make it any less impactful! Diarchy are certainly another addition to the growing list of two-piece bands who still bring the noise on serious levels.
Touted as being influenced by the likes of Clutch, Kyuss and Karma to Burn, I was pretty confident that this album was going to be right up my street. ‘Splitfire’ isn’t as raw as their previous effort, and shows an increase in confidence as the guys find their own niche in the stoner-rock genre. There’s a mixture of anthemic riff-driven tracks, and other more subtle tracks that at times threaten to be defined more as folk songs than rock songs.
The album opens with the former of this in the form of the impressive ‘Kamel Hossen’. The fuzzy, unrelenting guitar riff from Prakash Rawat is accompanied by the hard hitting drumming of bandmate Guarav Tiwari. Prakash’s vocals also come across slightly distorted, deliberately so, which adds a pretty interesting effect to this track as well. But then we move from this pretty heavy, catchy number onto something completely different in ‘Tirunelveli’ which has a far more psychedelic sound to it and is predominantly instrumental. It starts off as a relatively calm piece, that slowly builds in intensity and urgency into another distorted riff to lead back into ‘Gone to Late’.
The theme of swinging between these two moods continues throughout the rest of the album. Although it doesn’t stick to a distinct alternating track pattern, there is still a roughly 50/50 split of heavier fuzzy rock, and calm psychedelic riffs, the contrast of these makes both stand out that little bit more too. But the track that stood out most to me is the album closer ‘Best Way Out Is Always Through’ which is a haunting vocal duet that sounds like a shamanic chant accompanied by nothing other than a simple drumbeat. This is nothing like the rest of the album, which is probably what makes it stand out so much but it certainly shows that the vocal distortion on earlier tracks isn’t hiding anything!
This album is certainly going in my list of liked albums, which is threatening to become a very long list indeed. Whether it has done enough to make it into my top 20 albums of 2020 remains to be seen. We’re now a quarter of the way through the year, but there’s still plenty more to come that could overtake this album.
- ‘Splitfire’ is out now. You can get your copy HERE.
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