It is not often that the talent brought in to open for a bigger band draws louder cheers than the main act, but that is what happened at Unwind Centre on Friday. The cosy and friendly performance venue was packed with friends and fans — not only of Big Sam, which unveiled its latest video single ‘November’ that night, but also of The Owl Monk Collective, a band of four that took to the stage for the very first time.
Vocalist Bimal Tangachan, bassist Murali Krishna, guitarist Tom Roy and cajon player (and whistler, when required) Keshav Suryana have known each other for a while. The former three, in fact, have been friends since their kindergarten days in Kochi — “we played together in a band back in school,” said Bimal. The friends turned band mates again years later, after having moved to Chennai to pursue their respective careers — and if the number of colleagues who showed up to support their maiden gig is any indication, they have already made a mark.
It was easy to see how, as soon as they hit the first note of their song ‘Connect’. The mellow, hopeful yet somewhat bittersweet tune held the audience in its grasp easily, as did their second track ‘Chinaman’, which Bimal introduced as “an ode to people who try to do things differently, just like the Chinaman delivery in cricket”.
Unlike the first two songs, which were written entirely in English, number three on the band’s list was a Malayalam number. ‘Theeram’ (meaning, the shore), written on the beach, ode to companions. Not just lovers, but any companion — the band stressed — whom you have shared a moment or experience with. At the same time, it was also a song of longing, of a person waiting for a dear friend to return, much like the shore waits for the sea to come back to it again, and again.
“When we were talking about this interaction between the shore and sea, we were talking in Malayalam. The lyrics just came up — one line, in Malayalam. Personally, that line is quite close to me, quite beautiful,” explains Pritam. He couldn’t find words beautiful enough to replace them in English, and thus was born the band’s first Malayalam song.
Touching as ‘Theeram’ is, it was nevertheless their final song ‘Clarity’ that took the cake — reducing the cheery audience to pin-drop silence, pushing each person towards quiet contemplation. The song was about two minutes long, and for those two minutes, every person in the room was lost in thoughts.
“Tom and I wrote the song ‘Clarity’ when it was raining...it was at a point in our lives when we were really confused about what our future held for us. While writing, I had an image in my mind, of walking the long path towards a bleak light,” said Bimal after the performance. It was that image that the band tried to project through their lyrics and music, and it seemed to have worked.
