Does Avial celebrate Holi?

Look, I’ll address the elephant in the room: Last week I used a holiday as an excuse to highlight bands from another country, and this week I’m also using a holiday to highlight bands from another country. I’ll own up to that. But it’s not my fault they lined up like that! I’m always looking for excuses to expose you people to bands not from the U.S., U.K. or Canada and if two come up in consecutive weekends, that’s out of my hands.

Anyway, Monday is Holi. It’s a Hindu harvest festival that also celebrates the end of winter and beginning of spring and blossoming love, but odds are you know it as that holiday with people throwing brightly colored powders at each other. It’s extremely photogenic so pictures of it come up a lot.

For our purposes, though, it’s a reason for me to introduce you to some Indian bands I like. Four I don’t think I’ve mentioned before, but the first I absolutely have, and will again. Because it’s great.

Bloodywood — “Gaddaar”

I mentioned Bloodywood in my 2021 roundup of my favorite folk metal acts, because obviously, but it’s here again.

The band actually started as a joke on YouTube, posting metal covers of popular Bollywood songs, and gradually started writing and releasing its own music and developing its own style. It got its start in 2016 and didn’t actually release a proper album until 2022, because the Internet truly has broken the old system. In some ways that’s bad, but if it lets a band like Bloodywood get a following and make a living as musicians without having to convince a record executive it’s marketable, I’m all for it.

Pentagram — “Tomorrow’s Decided”

This one is less metal than you’d expect from a band called Pentagram, but just as good. The Mumbai band started out in the mid-’90s before evolving its style and breaking out about a decade later. Where it landed is a sort of electronica/industrial/rock hybrid; I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything exactly like it and that’s a shame, because it’s fantastic.

Pentagram doesn’t release albums especially often—its five to date have been in 1996, 2002, 2007, 2011 and 2019—but the band is worth the wait. And while I seriously dig its eventual genre landing spot, every point of the evolution is just as good.

Avial — “Chekele”

I don’t want to give any false impressions, so be aware those first two bands speak more to my taste than the second most populous nation on Earth’s musical output. For example, Avial is decidedly alt-rock, as evidenced by its version of this traditional Indian song. It’s much mellower. But I’m not opposed to that.

India, being very big and with a very long history, is not as monolingual as you might expect if you’re mostly familiar with Western nations. India has 22 regional languages with Hindi only serving as the common language of government than an official national language. I bring this up because Avial sings exclusively in Malayalam and is considered the pioneer of a larger Malayalam indie scene.

Junkyard Groove — “Rock and Roll”

So far, due to the theme of the column, I’ve focused on bands that mix an Indian sound with the rock framework to make something new and, to American ears, unique and interesting. But some bands in India are just straight-up excellent rock bands.

Junkyard Groove, for example, transcends time and location. Did it come out of Georgia in 1974? Liverpool in 1993? Neither, but both are plausible, along with countless other combinations! And I respect timeless music. It shows intrinsic quality outside any era’s trends.

High — “The White Knight’s Tale”

This one is apparently pretty obscure, so bear with me.

High was one of the first Indian rock bands from way back in 1974. Like many bands from the late ’60s and early ’70s, it had a bit of an obsession with Tolkien. This meant the band set some of Tolkien’s poems to music and recorded an entire rock opera called Tolkien Suite. It was a lot, and it was amazing.

That said, as far as albums go, we’ve just got The White Knight’s Tale. It was released in 2021 after being assembled by the late frontman’s son, Tejan Balakrishnan, from home recordings from the early ’80s. That’s why the sound quality isn’t fantastic. There are other bootlegs floating around, but none of them are on YouTube. I got mine by trading MP3s in the college dorms in 2004. But I don’t know how to attach those here without running afoul of some copyright bot.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis and send column ideas to him at @bayareadata.press on BlueSky.