Gouranga Keep Your Colours
Debuting live in 2010 Gouranga are a young band, so it is impressive to hear this baby taking its first few steps into the musical wildness and manging not to fall flat on its face.
Keep Your Colours is a definite throw back to the glory days of grunge, screaming choruses teamed with overly distorted guitars juxtaposing with soft pulsing verses – the old recipe.
Opening tracks Bile and It came to this offer thrashing, energetic riffs and growling vocals; the choruses are strong and memorable. Rose and Time continues the EP on a similar thread but with a much heavier intro, this intensity seeps through the tune and flows both through the ominous low vocal range and straight into the jumpy percussion. But then Rife Machine comes along, the fifth track on the EP and changes the tone completely, with a mellow guitar piece accompanied by minimal percussion the sound created grabs your attention. Plucky guitars and the simple ramblings of lead vocalist Andy leads you nicely into a melancholic number.
The band have created a sound that wouldn’t feel out of place in early 90s Seattle, there are obvious and prominent grunge influences, the recurrent use of low to high throughout the all of the tracks is reminiscent of early Nirvana. Yet to do justice to the band and besides all the obvious comparisons Gouranga have a deep and resonating sound, that offers something a little different.
Key tracks, Rife Machine and Bile sum up Gouranga’s sound and range well and highlight their ability to awaken a forgotten genre and fling it into the present – they somehow manage to retain grunge’s self service aesthetics with an electronic current feel.
3/5
Mikaela Osborne
