Shahenshah (Chabuk)
I’ll get the obvious out of the way.
Comparisons to Rage Against The Machine are immediate. This is a band doing rap-rock for the purpose of calling out bulls***. They exude angry power, and they are entirely uninhibited in their musical utterance. Their musicality is very much a flip-off to a world operating on the basis of greed, extortion, exploitation and general indecency.
India has no dearth of injustice, and consequently no dearth of musicians standing up to it with their music. Chabuk, however, will stand out among them if they can sustain the momentum of their debut music video. They start with some pensive instrumentation and quickly move into the mockerty. Set to the leitmotif of heavy, aggressive rock, the track is essentially cynical laughter being spit into a very problematic existence. Lyricist Microphon3 is practically a Shakespearean fool, but his jokes do not have to diluted with humour to protect a king’s ego. Instead, he shakes a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) fist to every downside that modernity has wrought upon existence.
Their souls are into it. There souls are nowhere but into it. Theirs is a derision that demands participation. Go ahead, assimilate into the contempt. It proves to be inordinately cathartic, and one doesn’t have have much of an excuse to not be angry anymore.
