Hotel Kali is a new Indo-German band that is launching its eponymous debut album
(From left) Debjit sahalanobis, Suyasha Sengupta, Varun Desai and Theresa Stroetges of Hotel Kali. Pic/Arhan Sett
It’s like the musical equivalent of Waiting for Godot. When you listen to Disco shobar — the third track on new Indo-German band Hotel Kali’s upcoming eponymous album — there are various points when you expect the song to break away from its mid-tempo groove and burst into funky guitars replete with disco bleeps that pull you to the dance floor. But it doesn’t happen. Like the central character in Samuel Beckett’s play, that change in tempo never arrives. The laidback track never gets up from its comfy couch.
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This sense of melodic restraint is something that Kolkata locals Varun Desai, Debjit Mahalanobis and Suyasha Sengupta — who formed the band with German guitarist Theresa Stroetges after she came down to the eastern city in 2018 — maintain throughout the seven-track record. But that’s not to say that you can’t shake a leg at all — the industrial bass line in Viola rave will do more than bob your head up and down. It’s just that this is not the sort of album that makes you fling your arms around. It’s refined listening, meant more for the morning after a heavy night out when you’re nursing a hangover with a cup of black coffee in hand.
But the music’s sonic design wasn’t premeditated. “It was like an improvised speech rather than a pre-written one,” Desai tells us about the jam sessions where the album took shape. Nowhere is this more apparent than right at the very end of the last track, Calm storm, where it takes such a deep experimental turn that you might need a second cup of coffee to process it all. It reflects the complete sense of freedom that the quartet gave each other. So, yes, the music in Hotel Kali might seem restrained at times, albeit in a mature manner.
But there was clearly no restraint at all when it came to the four musicians expressing their individuality as equal partners, for an album that shows how — unlike Godot — this band has arrived.
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