Sunday Driver ‘In the City of Dreadful Night’
January 21st, 2009 by Andrew Smith
Sunday Driver are 6 piece outfit who have been described as bringing together the English folk and Eastern influences. “In the City of Dreadful night” is their debut album.
Sunday Driver’s songs are driven by a playful, experimental spirit. To my ears, although there is a strong acoustic and Eastern flavour to the album, it doesn’t sound like what I would usually think of as folk music. There is something intriguing, but more difficult to categorise, going on.
The album is inspired by the backstreets of Victorian London and the chaos of Kipling’s Calcutta. The songs exude a sense of theatricality, as Chandy Nath tells her stories about the inhabitants and goings on in the enticing, yet threatening, city at night. This could almost be a soundtrack to a musical set in Calcutta. Interestingly, the Sunday Driver album launch party featured the band adopting Victorian guises and was performed on an opium den of a set, mixed with burlesque performances to bring their concept to life on stage. Sounds like a great gig!
Nath’s vocals effortlessly switch between singing Eastern melodies and a dramatic style that occasionally reminds me of Kate Bush. The musicians use combinations of guitars, sitars, harp, clarinet and piano, mixed with tabla and djembe percussion, to create a colourful accompaniment.
The album opens strongly with the intense “The Gayatri mantra”. Eastern vocal melodies chanted in Sanskrit intermingle with sitars over a tabla backing, as Sunday Driver build a foreboding atmosphere. The next track “Black Spider” takes an unexpected left turn as a jazzy clarinet and an almost cabaret style vocal made me feel like I’d wandered into a Vaudeville style theatre show.
After the unexpected contrast in the opening tracks, the album settles into an acoustic style with guitars and harp becoming more prominent. Clever use of instrumentation helps create different flavours, and the songs mix up Eastern and Western style influences and melodies.
The imagery of the lyrics gave me the impression that the dwellers are longing for release from the cruel city. The harp led ballad “Sweet Dreams” is a lament for dreams of love. People go “Down by the Den” to try to escape themselves. In “Bakul Bagan Road” people are looking at the stars longingly. We also get to meet the rodents in the sewer (”Rats”), as well as the previously mentioned black spider; I wondered if these two songs are also metaphors for some of the city’s human inhabitants. The album ends with the anxious carnal fantasies of “Naked Bodies” accompanied by an eerie piano.
Sunday Driver weave an exotic musical tapestry, where East and West cultures meet to create an album filled with drama, dark humour and yearning.
The album is available on CD and download from iTunes.
www.sundaydriver.co.uk
Review by Andrew Smith.
