Altsounds - Sunday Driver - Rats / The Gayatri Mantra [Single]

For those that don’t know, there is a gene commonly found in mice called ‘Sunday Driver’. There is also a band commonly found in London called ‘Sunday Driver’. The connection between the two is a vague one, in which the band thought that an obscure mouse gene best suited for their music.

Sunday Driver are a sextet, formed by Chandy Nath after a bleak five months living in Antarctica. She returned determined to form a band, and found herself a merry group consisting of Kat Arney, James Clayton, Matthew Sarkar, Richard Bullen and Simon Richardson, and together they experimented with English folk fused with far Eastern influences.

Their double A side features two songs from their upcoming album The Dreadful City of Night. The first song Rats orients itself around a folk inspired high and woody guitar picking. The song’s lyrics give a glimpse into the sinister place that was Victorian England, a haunting tale of the back streets ofLondon; ‘the rats that run in the subway’ representing the rat race of the town. This is a slightly dark song, but the plucky guitar on the offbeat keeps the tempo up. Meanwhile, Chandy’s singing pirouettes above the guitar, her emphatic style sets off the delicate picking beautifully.

The second song The Gayatri Mantra has a heavy far Eastern influence, and makes use of wonderful instruments such as sitars, Tablas and dessert spoons! The Gayatri is in fact a feminine form of the Gayatra, a hymn revered by both Buddhists and Hindus, written in ancient Sanskrit. This is a traditional Indian style song; the nostalgic reverberations of the sitar reminiscent of an early Satyajit Ray soundtrack. There are heavy layers of sitar, oboe, and strumming that create a rich bed of noise while the ringing of the guitar echoes Chandy’s flamboyant vocals.

These two songs are an example of the bridge that can be made between Western and far Eastern music. While some may be condescending of such combinations, (I have heard Beruit’s music described as ‘cultural rape’) I feel that acknowledgement of another culture’s music as its own genre is an important progression in our Western music culture. Sunday Driver have respectfully brought traditional Indian with English folk side by side, each to be appreciated for musical merit, not as a colourful novelty- and they do a wonderful job of it.

Download this double A side for free from http://www.myspace.com/sundaydriverinuk and see what you think.