Midway through Junkyard Groove(JYG)’s debut album, the music resembles a junkyard of sounds filled with old rusted chords, spare/highschoolish bass fills and echoes of songs that you might have once heard on the radio. The groove is inexplicably hidden yet the shed tries to brandish a brand new polished and produced sound out of used, once-popular tunes that now seem way past their lifespan.

The 3-piece Chennai-based outfit, which won the famous Desert Rock Festival courtesy its energetic live act and its pop, or what fans would call contemporary repertoire, releases its first full-length album ‘11:11’. Five years old in a country where bands form ‘just for timepass’, these guys have worked their way up to being one of the most talked about bands in the country.

JYG’s sound borders on a slightly uninteresting pop-rock slash commercial one that would have any love-deprived, emo-sensing person humming along in a few beats and loving it to the core. With all due respect, that is. Add to that a few cliched chord changes, drum breaks and some unpardonable rhymes(‘Twinkle, Twinkle little star/ How much I love you just the way you are/ Up above the sky so high, You are the diamond in my life’) that probably makes even the late Jane Taylor(the poet who wrote the Nursery rhyme) roll in her grave.

‘Open’, an Eddie Vedder-Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan styled attempt starts the album and is clearly a very distant cousin(or even a relative by marriage) with unimaginative songwriting strewn together seemingly to add ‘variety’ to the album. Yet, that’s exactly what the song lacks – variation. It’s strange how the song even warrants a place in the album, let alone opening the album. I mean, guys you do want us to listen to the rest of the album. Right? That said, ‘Rock N Roll’, a touch cliched lyric, on what rock n roll can give you, sounds like an ideal opener for JYG with Ameeth Thomas’s strong vocals and the band’s tight act that does indeed have the sonic appeal to take the band to a more sub-continental level.

‘Imagine’, ‘Let You Go’ typifies what’s wrong with the feel of the band on this album. Play the album top to bottom, tunes do stick out with hummable choruses and teen-love/ballad-like verses, but what is the sound of this band? Difficult to figure because JYG feels like an assortment of melodic pop songs that have not found their zone, and are in no hurry to do so. ‘Thank You’ sounds like a song from Ten(Pearl Jam, pardon the repeated comparison) with its riff-driven hard-hitting sound and vocal lines reminiscent of a young, long-haired Vedder jumping on stage, but has nothing new or JYG-like that a band on its first record should ideally be putting out. Especially at a time when we are having high quality indie releases all over the country and most artistes are striving to improve their sound and hence the impact on their audience. From the out of tune tabla on the opener to the utterly predictable guitar lines on almost every song leaves us with only one verdict – disappointing. Granted it does display a few strong melodies but the majority of the songs on the album sound like any other pop-rock we’ve all heard before.

That being said, this is not an entirely unlistenable album. ‘It’s OK’ and ‘Folk You’, which are amongst the first few songs that the band wrote and performed live, seems like the kind of skin that JYG feels more comfortable in. Free flowing chords, soothing harmonies with deft vocals, and smooth guitar work show a lot of promise. These two tracks give us a slight peek at what the band really is, heavens apart from the rest of the album.

JYG have a long way to go before they find their groove but the commercial appeal of the band, combined with their ever-increasing fanbase and radio-friendly singles, have the ability to reach out to a wide audience panning the whole nation and maybe even beyond. We hope they can find something more than their ‘hit-formula’ on the second album which they plan to record very soon.

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