Wall of Want- Peter Cat Recording Co.

Is there any better way to start the New Year than with new music? That certainly seems to be the thought behind Peter Cat Recording Co’s latest album ‘Wall of Want’, released exactly a year after their un-ignorable offering ‘Sinema’.

While the band describes their new record as “A lo-fi collection of old tape experiments, self destructing loops, brief laptop recordings and just echo noise” and “mostly unlistenable”, there’s more to this release than just demos and what seem to sound as filler-material on the first listen.

The production is as raw as it gets, but what PCRC lose out in recording quality, they make up for in strong song-writing. The opening instrumental ‘Krypton’ seems to be a haunting piece, which is followed by ‘Servants’. The 3 minute track is washy vocals and a simple acoustic tune, but vocalist Suryakant Sawhney makes it memorable for even that. On ‘A Glass or Two’, the band takes inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ for an indie folk tune reminiscent of Neutral Milk Hotel.

Strangely, there’s only a single track – ‘Love Demons’ – that has its demo version on this album. The rest of them can only be estimated as early recordings and rough ideas. This version is another dark psychedelic haze. ‘After Dinner’ is the first of the looped compositions, breaking into fuzzy guitars from Anindya ‘Andy’ Shanker and almost inaudible vocals from Sawhney. ‘And a Now’ is another outtake drowned in a fuzz-faced loop.

The band may have closed free downloads, but they leave another offer open to listeners – to “feel free to use any audio for samples or scores”. ‘Barbarossa’ is the best example, starting with a sinister bass line from Rohan Kulshreshtha with the rest taking the form fit for a yesteryear Bollywood score.

‘You are the Sea’ comes across as the sweetest song on the album, a wistful song. This is followed by the operatic piece set to a reverb-heavy loop in ‘Burn You’. When something as positive as the previous track leaks into a moaning, wailing one, you begin to think PCRC had set out to compile ‘Wall of Want’ with a song for every mood.

Well, at least one half of the emotion spectrum.