On 23rd March, Friday. Lost & Found, the Christ College band, and a band from Chennai (not yet confirmed).
Saturday, March 10th
@ Unwind Centre, Bangalore
Today, there were two excellent sets by Fahrenheit and Haven, the two St. Joseph college bands. The evening started off with Fahrenheit playing a rousing version of the Deep Purple classic Perfect strangers.
Saturday, March 10th
@ Unwind Centre, Bangalore
Today, there were two excellent sets by Fahrenheit and Haven, the two St. Joseph college bands. The evening started off with Fahrenheit playing a rousing version of the Deep Purple classic Perfect strangers.
Fahrenheit consists of Geeth on the guitars, Vinyl on drums, Jason on bass, Rachel on keyboards, and Akshay on vocals. They have been around a long time, since it started off as a school band before graduating to a college band, although the band members themselves haven't. Graduated, I mean. B.Com. They have played at the Bangalore Habba 2005 and were the winners of Times URock 2006. They call themselves a progressive rock band, which also forays into other genre.
Fahrenheit followed on with a number of other progressive rock/heavy metal/hard rock pieces: an Iron Maiden number, Queen of the Reich from Queensryche, a Def Leppard cover, and they played Bon Jovi’s ‘Living on a Prayer’ on request from someone in the crowd.
Rachel was really good on the keyboard, especially on the Deep Purple number. She has undergone extensive training as a classical pianist, and it shows. The lead and base were good. The vocals were a bit off-key and flat, but Akshay made up for that with a good stage presence - he was very popular with the crowd, esp. the babes (Damn! I was hoping to complete this review without mentioning babes even once.)
The truly outstanding performance was from Vinyl, the drummer. The drumming was consistently sharp and attacking – especially on the Queensryche piece, and Vinyl has a great stage presence. He looks as if he really enjoys his job, and had an evil smile on his face as he thrashed the drums with sadistic pleasure. That is what stage-presence is about, after all- it is not enough to thoroughly enjoy what you are doing, you have to look it, and make the audience a part of it as well.
They ended with an own comp “Bike crash at trinity circle” about the time two of the band members had a crash there on their bike. It started with a melodramatic gothic build up, like a heavy metal ballad, portending the impending crash, exploding into a rousing heavy metal strafe bombing- signifying, no doubt, the crash itself.
Fahrenheit were followed by Aditya, who played a couple of songs solo on the acoustic: a Dave Matthews Band cover and an Incubus cover. Really impressive.
Haven took the stage last. Haven call themselves an Alternative Rock band, with influences of Blues, Classic Rock, and Funk. The current line-up is Hemanth on lead, Venkat on bass, Elvis on drums, Neville on vocals. They have been together about seven months, and plan to cut a demo tape soon. They are all in their 2nd/3rd year at St Josephs, and will be graduating and getting jobs soon, but they plan to stick together and continue playing music. They also plan to follow their individual interests: Venkat wants to explore Jazz, Hemanth, the Blues. Haven were the national runners up and south zone winners for this year’s Campus Rock Idols. Haven started off with Perl Jam’s Animal. Then a really excellent cover of Creed’s My Sacrifice, which sounded like an exact replica of the CD, including (amazingly) the vocals. Vocals are generally the weakest link in Indian rock bands, but Neville does a really good job. They played three own comp’s: This moment, Thunderbolt and Angel tonight, which were well received. On request from the audience, they played the Door’s ‘Love me two times’. This was basically a heavy metal version of the song, with a heavy base riff, grunge style singing, strong drumming and no keyboards. It sounded strange without the distinctive Door’s keyboard….not exactly bad, but…different.
They ended with a nice cover of Coldplay’s Yellow.
Which brings me neatly to the Babe review…. (I had a small bet with Slughead that I could write a review without mentioning babes, but since I’ve already lost…)…there was this alarmingly pretty babe in a lemon yellow T-shirt…very cute. Wish I knew her name. Too bad, she already had a guy ;(
Anyway, the Unwind Center crowd is always a good mix of male and female, which is one of the nice things about this place. Girls obviously feel comfortable here: there is a nice, safe and homely feel about this place. Everyone is polite, well-behaved, and only there for the music.
The sound was…LOUD. My ears are still ringing, after two days. I have spoken to Ram about this. It can be really damaging is such a confined space. He says he had turned the knobs all the way town to 1/3, but it was still too loud. He promised to keep it even lower next time.
Mea Culpa: Photographs stolen from the Bands’ Orkup community pages…I still haven’t gotten around to buying my own camera ;(
