Peter Cat Recording Co. — Bismillah (5 July, 2019) 
✹ In 8 years, we learned, we shared, we grew, got married, got signed, got better and our new album is a culmination of that journey. With it and with you the listener, we will close a chapter of our lives together and step out into a new one filled with new sounds and colours.
✹ Thank you for allowing us to survive in a world hostile (financially speaking) to what we do and intend to keep doing. Art is only one of many means to a better world, and we hope that ours, in the form of music and film shared with you will lead and assist you towards the formation of that.
✹ In the spirit of these words, we invite you to take a larger responsibility in our existence. We do not wish to be bound by the whims of streaming and internet companies. For once it all dissolves, so will we. Make an effort to buy our music from us so that we may become invincible. Make an effort to come see our shows so that we may move you. Above all, join our mailing list and be informed about what we are doing. You’ll be constantly surprised and rewarded. Its time you stopped sitting there like another passive idiot. Bismillah!
Location: Delhi, India
Album release: 5th July, 2019
Record Label: Panache Records
Duration: 50:56
Tracks:
01 Where the Money Flows 5:13
02 Floated By 4:16
03 Soulless Friends 3:47
04 Vishnu
05 Memory Box 8:04
06 Freezing 2:54
07 Heera 6:20
08 I’m This 4:39
09 Remain in Me 4:54
10 Shit I’m Dreaming 6:23
The band consists of five members:
★ Suryakant Sawhney, the lead singer and guitarist;
★ Karan Singh, the drummer;
★ Dhruv Bhola, who plays bass and samples;
★ Rohit Gupta on Keys and Trumpet; and
★ Kartik Sundareshan Pillai, who plays keyboards, guitar, electronics and trumpet
Album Review by Joe Creely | 04 Jul 2019 | Score: ★★★★
Peter Cat Recording Co. announce themselves with a gorgeous set of songs, in turn weary and swooning.
✹ Peter Cat Recording Co.’s initial European release — the compilation Portrait of a Time: 2010~2016 — had a quality that ten or fifteen years ago would’ve been described as hauntological; an eeriness, the sound of Sinatra actively mourning the fact that in being recorded he is to be trapped in heartbreak forever. There are remnants of this feeling in Bismillah, but more notable is the sense of a band exploding into colour, freeing themselves from the past and looking forward in every direction at once.
✹ This sonic restlessness is evident from opening track ‘Where the Money Flows’, which instrumentally moves from a gentle strum to what could pass for a psychedelic Californian indie~rap beat, taking in a cavernous verse full of AutoTune and echo for good measure, without ever losing its way. Then there’s the album’s centrepiece, the extended disco banger Memory Box, which builds and builds into a flurry of jabbing strings and juddering guitars around singer Suryakant Sawhney opening up his usual croon into a soulful wail, giving a real desperate emotion to a song that could easily have been just a genre exercise.
✹ The disparate sonics could harm the album’s cohesion but the texture and shape of Sawhney’s voice, rich and controlled but never mannered, gives the album an almost narrative feel of a character weathering life’s disappointments and pains before ultimately finding redemption in other people. This sense of hope that pervades the final few tracks means a slight settling down of the diverse sounds. The last two tracks have moments that owe a healthy debt to Neutral Milk Hotel’s patented flabby brass and rattling cymbal crash sound but they are so rich in tiny sonic detail and unadorned, unselfconscious lyrical grace (particularly I’m This) that they still feel totally their own.
✹ It may be slightly cheating to describe it as a debut album, but if this is the record that is to properly introduce Peter Cat Recording Co. to Europe then it’s as good a choice as any. A vibrant, eclectic joy. ✹ https://www.theskinny.co.uk/
Website: http://www.pcrc.in/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/petercatrecordingco/
______________________________________________
✹ Thank you for allowing us to survive in a world hostile (financially speaking) to what we do and intend to keep doing. Art is only one of many means to a better world, and we hope that ours, in the form of music and film shared with you will lead and assist you towards the formation of that.
✹ In the spirit of these words, we invite you to take a larger responsibility in our existence. We do not wish to be bound by the whims of streaming and internet companies. For once it all dissolves, so will we. Make an effort to buy our music from us so that we may become invincible. Make an effort to come see our shows so that we may move you. Above all, join our mailing list and be informed about what we are doing. You’ll be constantly surprised and rewarded. Its time you stopped sitting there like another passive idiot. Bismillah!
Location: Delhi, India
Album release: 5th July, 2019
Record Label: Panache Records
Duration: 50:56
Tracks:
01 Where the Money Flows 5:13
02 Floated By 4:16
03 Soulless Friends 3:47
04 Vishnu
05 Memory Box 8:04
06 Freezing 2:54
07 Heera 6:20
08 I’m This 4:39
09 Remain in Me 4:54
10 Shit I’m Dreaming 6:23
The band consists of five members:
★ Suryakant Sawhney, the lead singer and guitarist;
★ Karan Singh, the drummer;
★ Dhruv Bhola, who plays bass and samples;
★ Rohit Gupta on Keys and Trumpet; and
★ Kartik Sundareshan Pillai, who plays keyboards, guitar, electronics and trumpet
Album Review by Joe Creely | 04 Jul 2019 | Score: ★★★★
Peter Cat Recording Co. announce themselves with a gorgeous set of songs, in turn weary and swooning.
✹ Peter Cat Recording Co.’s initial European release — the compilation Portrait of a Time: 2010~2016 — had a quality that ten or fifteen years ago would’ve been described as hauntological; an eeriness, the sound of Sinatra actively mourning the fact that in being recorded he is to be trapped in heartbreak forever. There are remnants of this feeling in Bismillah, but more notable is the sense of a band exploding into colour, freeing themselves from the past and looking forward in every direction at once.
✹ This sonic restlessness is evident from opening track ‘Where the Money Flows’, which instrumentally moves from a gentle strum to what could pass for a psychedelic Californian indie~rap beat, taking in a cavernous verse full of AutoTune and echo for good measure, without ever losing its way. Then there’s the album’s centrepiece, the extended disco banger Memory Box, which builds and builds into a flurry of jabbing strings and juddering guitars around singer Suryakant Sawhney opening up his usual croon into a soulful wail, giving a real desperate emotion to a song that could easily have been just a genre exercise.
✹ The disparate sonics could harm the album’s cohesion but the texture and shape of Sawhney’s voice, rich and controlled but never mannered, gives the album an almost narrative feel of a character weathering life’s disappointments and pains before ultimately finding redemption in other people. This sense of hope that pervades the final few tracks means a slight settling down of the diverse sounds. The last two tracks have moments that owe a healthy debt to Neutral Milk Hotel’s patented flabby brass and rattling cymbal crash sound but they are so rich in tiny sonic detail and unadorned, unselfconscious lyrical grace (particularly I’m This) that they still feel totally their own.
✹ It may be slightly cheating to describe it as a debut album, but if this is the record that is to properly introduce Peter Cat Recording Co. to Europe then it’s as good a choice as any. A vibrant, eclectic joy. ✹ https://www.theskinny.co.uk/
Website: http://www.pcrc.in/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/petercatrecordingco/
______________________________________________