“Gyara 59” provides a brief lull with steady, syncopated tabla, and then the whole album explodes with “The Bombay Twist.” First you hear a clip of maniacal laughter slowly fading out as the central riff crawls in on sitar, and the drums slam down all at once out of the blue and the trumpets suddenly kick off, circling around and around the same basic melody. One slinky dance groove follows another in an expertly paced sequence of flash and glamour, passing through the eerie “Hooghly Night Patrol” and its magnificent horn parade, into the jittery “(Give Me Back My) Bunty Bunty,” wherein a spiraling, glittery keyboard hook gives way to one of the few English lyrics on the record: Singh croons “Give me back my bunty bunty,” whatever that means, then Bhattacharnya blurts out “I don’t have your bunty bunty.” and so goes the call and response until that high keyboard trill starts sputtering again. Lead singers Parvyn Kaur Singh (“The Lady”) and Shourov Bhattacharnya (“The Tiger”) seductively eye each other from opposite ends of the microphone, alternating verses and occasionally chiming in together. But that just makes them more intense.Īfter “Ankhiyan” starts the album with a bang, The Island of Dr Electrico sashays into even gaudier territory. Compared to Asha Bhosle, say, the Bollywood playback vocalist who apparently sang over 12,000 songs for actual actresses to lip-sync on screen, the Bombay Royale exaggerate the genre’s kitschy side, an inevitable result of their goofy irony. Play the record twice, however, and you’ll realize that not only was this an actual style of music with close ties to the Indian film industry in the ‘70s, but that the band has fully inhabited it to the best of their ability. At first, The Island of Dr Electrico sounds like a brilliantly thought-through parody of pseudo-Oriental exoticism, of Harrison Ford riding elephants, of Roger Moore sneaking around sumptuous palaces, of every sitar ever awkwardly dropped into a pop song. They released their debut album You Me Bullets Love in 2012 and their excellent follow-up The Island of Dr Electrico this July on the Melbourne label Hope Street.
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On record, they flavor their gloriously schlocky Indian cabaret-pop with blazing guitar fury, sizzling ribbons of synthesizer, bizarre tape effects, smooth disco violins that evoke a leisure lounge and breathe rah-rah-Rasputin, one particularly ominous loop of a stock villain cackling over and over again, and a full brass ensemble. Visually, they dress up in outrageous costumes, including one orange tunic, one sailor’s cap, and several Zorro masks. Each band member has given himself or herself a ridiculous spy-thriller alias, like “The Jewel Thief” (Josh Bennett, their multi-instrumentalist on sitar and tabla) and “The Kungfu Dentist” (Ros Jones, their trombone player).
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What fun.įounded by conductor/saxophone whiz Andy Williamson, the Bombay Royale are eleven Australian troublemakers who play their own hammy, modernized style of Bollywood movie music.
The song is called “Ankhiyan.” It opens the Bombay Royale’s second album, The Island of Dr Electrico. This all repeats itself once, with extra synthesized violins and camped-up saxophone interrupting every now and again to make some histrionic point, before ending abruptly on the same piercing guitar it started with.
A balmy-voiced male singer begins to purr as the melody is played on a lower stringed acoustic a female voice briefly takes over as another faux-ominous trombone figure emerges the two singers keep trading off verses until an even more theatrical procession of strings and horn erupts, swooping down with all the extravagant fire of a veritable disco orchestra. Then the drums come in, supported by thick drone. A high, piercing riff is twice ripped out of a harsh electric guitar before an intense blast of bass jumps out from underneath.
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