I bet that you didn’t ever listen doom / stoner from India, well, everything changes in this unstable world. Bangalore-based stoner/doom/metal quintet Bevar Sea has been functional for the best part of two years now, having started out in late 2010, and having gathered an unprecedented cult following in the country in such a short span of time. Influenced by heavy blues-rock of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the band is focused on presenting classic heavy metal exactly the way it should be, by employing an organic, no-frills approach to songwriting and live musicianship. The band did release their debut album featuring some of their best songs in October 2012. The album was recorded by the band themselves in early 2012, and is mixed and mastered by Billy Anderson (Melvins, Neurosis, Sleep, High on Fire, Agalloch etc), with artwork from the band’s lead guitarist and artist Rahul Chacko. Here comes guitarist of Bevar Sea – Sirkanth Panaman. Be prepare to enlightenment.
Hail comrade! I feel that most of our readers see your name for a first time, and more than this – I bet that they’ll be really surprised when find that Bevar Sea is Indian band playing bloody qualitative stoner doom metal. So what are main facts besides those mentioned above which me must know about the band?
Hails! Thanks for the compliments, and for having us over at doomantia! I’ve been a follower of the site for a long time! I started Bevar Sea in 2008 as a hobby project with a friend of mine, and things changed over the next two years, and it eventually got a five piece line-up with two guitars and a vocalist, a drummer and a bassist. We practiced throughout the second half of 2010 and made our live debut in 2011, we recorded our debut album in late 2011 and early 2012 and got it mixed and mastered by the mighty Billy Anderson. The album saw a release in late 2012 and we’ve been really happy with the response it has received so far. We just opened for Anathema, a band which we grew up listening to, and we brought the house down. We’re pretty much on a high at this point!
I think it would be right to ask you about band’s name – what does “Bevar” mean? And what were your motives to create the band? What is main idea behind Bevar Sea?
Ha! It’s a play on the local language word ‘bevarsi’ which means bastard. Lots of doom bands have the sea/ocean connection as well, so that’s where the band name comes from.
I would like to ask you introduce band’s crew for our readers, I know that some of you have musical background…
Deepak our drummer is from LA Music Academy and is the most schooled of us all. Avinash, our bassist is from a music school here as well. Our vocalist/lyricist Ganesh is also a bass player and has been in local bands. Rahul Chacko, our lead guitarist, is also a very talented illustrator and does all our artwork. I’m Srikanth, the least talented guy in the band but I have the riffage, and am also the de facto producer of our music!
Ha-ha, so is it hard to produce stoner doom from India?
I think it’s hard to produce any real rock/metal in India. The producers/engineers here don’t really know how to mic a drum kit and get a nice natural sound, bands don’t use tube amps, and therefore most metal producers/engineers here take the shortcut to save costs and program drums and use emulated/digital guitar sounds. They don’t know any reference for the dirtier kind of music either, so they don’t really understand how to approach this. At least I haven’t come across those people – may be they’re working in big studios and are churning out crappy Bollywood music. That is why I made the investment and the effort to teach myself how to record ourselves, and then found Billy Anderson to mix and master our album. I think for the next one I hope to fly Billy down for the entire project.
Does the origin of Bevar Sea work enough well as attractive factor for new listeners?
We’ve got a pretty decent following here, and we see a lot of our fans coming to shows rocking our t-shirts. A lot of them weren’t very familiar with doom before we came along, and now they’re getting more into it. It helps that we play doom with the kind of classic/70s sensibilities that they’re already quite familiar with. So doom has taken off here more than I would’ve expected, and I actually am running a distro to help these people source quality doom titles in India. Eventually it’s going to help the scene here. There’ll be more doom fans, and there’ll be more doom bands.
How can you describe main characteristics of the band which you may consider as typical for Indian scene?
I am not really sure. The one characteristic of the band that is similar to other bands in the scene is that we too struggle to procure quality playing and recording equipment because of lack of availability in our country. So we learn to work with what we have. For example, all our club gigs have decent PA systems and good monitors, but they have horrible amps, so our guitar players and bassists are always equipped with pedals and processors to go direct into the mixer. It’s a compromise, but that’s the only way we can survive the scene where there’s often no soundcheck and the equipment is worse than most first world-ers have in their bedrooms. I don’t know what else is typical of the Indian scene. We pretty much learn from the international scenes. Did that answer your question?
Yes, it does! But don’t you ever think to combine some of your national culture features with western music?
We don’t force anything. We speak to each other in English, we think in English even though we’re multilingual, and we all grew up listening to and watching western things. There’s still obviously an undeniable local flavor in us as people, and if that’s going to come through in the music, we’ll not fight it. But it’s going to have to be natural.
There’re a lot different languages in India besides two official ones – Hindi and English, why don’t you use some of them for songs lyrics? Though – true to say – I have no idea how it could sound with heavy riffs!
Ha! It might work. It’s just that, like I said, we’re all pretty much English users. There is a death metal band here called Dhwesha that plays Bolt Thrower and Dismember type music but with lyrics in our local language Kannada, and they made it work. We just don’t know our local languages well enough to even consider it honestly. It’s not like those Spanish/South American bands here – we used to be a British colony, and we have so many languages here to even keep track of, so English is pretty much the common language for urban people.
How much did western scene influence upon Bevar Sea and how much of local influences do you have in your music?
Absolutely no local influences in our music. Our influences are pretty much Black Sabbath and the bands that are influenced by them. This kind of sound might be generic and outdated, but that’s the way we like it. We actually don’t think about the influences too much – we all draw from a wide variety of heavy music and we work within the broad boundaries that we’ve set ourselves for this band. For Bevar Sea, we keep it heavy, groovy, riffy, with the 70s influence. It’s partly a tribute to our favourite riff masters, and partly our contribution to keep it alive and take it to the next level.
What were first heavy bands which did entice you into underground scene? Let me guess… B.S.? Right?
70s heavy rock would be our roots for sure. Also, most of us have thrash, death and 80s metal background. I was always into some form of doom, but I think in early 2000s when I discovered the Man’s Ruin, Tee Pee, Rise Above, Relapse, Small Stone Records style of stoner/doom/sludge bands that were more closer to the Sabbath sound and not the weepy European kind, that quickly became a favourite, and eventually wanted to form a band that played this kind of music.
Once I’ve surfed metal-archives trying to find any active doom band but I don’t remember that I get any band with a full-length album in their list, so we may suppose that doom isn’t popular at all in your country. How would you analyze modern tendencies onto Indian scene?
Our city, Bangalore had a death/doom band in the 90s. Around the time we were starting out, they were making their comeback as well, with our drummer in the new lineup. There was also a band from Mumbai called Dormant Inferno which put out an EP. They’re more of the Peaceville Records kind of doom. Our ex-bassist quit our band in 2011 and went on to form a doom/drone type band called Djinn & Miskatonic, and our drummer has another band called Shepherd which plays more straight-up sludge with punk and Soundgarden type influences. That’s it for doom related music from India at the moment. Most new bands play djent, metalcore or whatever’s trendy and cool, but there’s also a small scene where the old school style bands are getting together and doing shows, putting out splits etc. There’s still not enough bands here for any proper scenes for sub-genres.
I know that Bevar Sea play gigs time to time and you even did share scene with Orphaned Land, how often do you play in Bangalore and do you see perspectives of playing abroad?
We played a dozen gigs each in 2011 and 2012, with a vast majority of them in Bangalore and a few out of town gigs too. Highlights would be opening for Kreator and Anathema of course. Since the scene here is not that big and not conducive for tours, our focus is really on getting to Europe with our second album after getting the most out of the first album in 2013.
Both of Bevar Sea’s demos and self-titled full-length have similar paintings, who is it’s author and do you follow any conception using these art-works for your CDs?
Rahul Chacko, our lead guitarist is the in-house artist for the band. We started with having a piece of art for every song we played live. We would project the artwork in the background as well. Whenever people got familiar with the songs and the artwork, we would also put out posters, tshirts, and stickers for sale at shows. The album artwork just has a big nautical themed painting that extends across 3 panels of the digipak, and it also has all the individual song artwork in the booklet inside. Chacko put in a lot of work on the album for sure.
Man, may you comment lyrics of songs from debut full-length?
“Abishtu” is a song about a serial killer and his ride that goes around tormenting hipsters, and is always on the run from the cops. Mono Gnome is a song about a midget, and the hots he has for a witch. Their commune results in a fire, because of a curse that the witch carries, that sets the world on fire. Another song, “Universal Sleeper”, is set in limbo, a drug fiend spawns a generation of workers, a populace - bent on mind domination. The second part, the song titled “Sleeping Pool”, is when it all goes bad, and musically it takes the band to their doomiest and the bleakest yet. Sleeping Pool will go on the second album.
Srikanth, I think that our interview is quiet informative so let us finish it with few words about future plans of Bevar Sea! Thanks for your time comrade!
Thanks a ton for the opportunity, Aleks. I’ve been a long time follower of Doommantia and we’re honoured to be featured here. Bevar Sea is in the process of doing pre-production work on some of our newer material – I think it’ll be put out as an EP/MCD later this year, or we’ll keep the songs for our next full length. We have to decide still, but we’re recording demos anyway because it’s become a habit – and they’re sound pretty damn good. We’re also a part of an Indian tribute to Motorhead, and I’ll be producing the album. It features a dozen of the country’s best old school style metal bands, and it’s an exciting project for us to be part of. It should be out in May. Apart from that, we just want to focus on writing new material and have enough new songs for the second album by the end of 2013. We will also continue to promote our debut album this year. A couple of shows a month won’t hurt either, and we’ve got a new management here to take care of that. Let’s see how things go. DOOM!
Interview By Aleks
Bevar Sea.Com
YouTube Channel