JOIN USThe Bicycle Days are a five-piece, psychedelic alternative rock band from Bangalore. The band consists of Karthik Basker (vocals, samples), Rahul Ranganath (guitars, samples), Ramanan Chandramouli (guitars), Shek (bass) and Shreyas Dipali (drums).
Their first gig was at the National Law School’s Strawberry Fields Festival in November 2009. They were placed second at the fest, and since then, there has been no looking back. Soon, they released their debut EP 42 in early 2010 and won the AVIMA Awards 2010 in the “Most Genre Bending Band Category”.
Calamitunes is their new nine-track LP that was released recently. Their music is layered with electronic and funky elements. The songs have lyrics on social themes and represent a range of emotions from anger to desperation, submission to indecisiveness.
The album oscillates from heavy to soft and mellow between songs and within songs. The opening track, Vicious, is close to the metallic sound with fuzzy guitars. Conundrum has a jazz element coupled with heavy and drowning guitars.
Crawl, Hush and Escape has subdued vocals with ambient and atmospheric electronic sound. Indignation is an odd ball of a track that defies labelling. Staccato drums and distorted guitars progress into dense guitar riffs. Circles is a new rendition of their song from their debut EP 42. The new improved version could be a concert puller. The lyrics of Mould are simple yet profound.
Both the vocals and music are minimalistic. Truce, the last song in the album, is in a similar mould (pun intended) as the previous song. On the whole, the band is quite experimental and steers clear of ‘classical’ style of instrumentation and vocals. It may not be a good thing as far as mass appeal goes.