Today marks the fifth time we’ve written about and/or premiered singles by The Second Fovea (a band who began in India and are now based in the San Francisco Bay area) — and thus we’ve covered all of them to date. Thematically, each one has been different from the ones before, but all of them driven by a socio-political consciousness:
“Headshot” was a condemnation of hate crimes and racism across the globe. “Manta” was devoted to the majesty and mystery of the creatures for whom the song was named and tried to help spread the word about their conservation (we featured two different videos for that song). “The Echoing Habitat” called attention to our relentless pollution of the oceans with plastics. And today we have a fourth single, “Vibora“, which takes as its subject a metaphor for the lethal consequences of greed.
Just as the band’s lyrical themes have differed, the music has differed too, from song to song, and it changes again here, in part due to the appearance of the band’s new permanent vocalist, “Lalit Mehta“, who lives in Dublin, Ireland.
You can tell from the cover art for “Vibora” that it has something to do with snakes. Nasty snakes. The song’s name itself means “viper” in Portuguese or “snake” in Spanish. As the band tell us, the song is “dedicated to the Golden Lancehead Vipers, a type of snake found exclusively on an island off the Brazilian coast (Ilha de Queimada Grande, aka Snake Island).” They say, “This is one of the most dangerous places in the world and humans are not allowed to enter”.
But as noted above, the song is a metaphor for a different subject, a metaphor expressed in the narrative of the track. Again from the band:
Sailors are sailing through the Atlantic ocean… they spot something golden on a thickly forested island… their greed makes them believe that it is actual gold… they dock and walk into the thick jungle only to realize those are golden snakes… they try to escape but end up dying due to snake bite. The song describes their story and experience on Snake Island. The moral being – Greed is not a good thing. It can kill you.
As for the music this time, it’s driven by heavy, hammering grooves (and indeed, groove has been one of the throughlines in the band’s musical evolution) and lots of pulse-punching, skull-cracking drumwork. As you might expect, it also incorporates sinister slithering guitar-leads and venomous warping electronics, and succeeds in creating an overarching aura of menace.
All of that provides the backdrop for remarkably wide-ranging vocals, sometimes layered for extra intensity. You’ll hear some singing near the beginning and end (singing of different kinds), and in between Mehta howls like a madman (the first one goes on for an impressively long time), screams like being strangled with barbed wire, growls like a caged beast, and fanatically yells.
Prepare for your muscles to start jumping and venom to enter your veins:
LINEUP FOR “VIBORA”:
Vocals: Lalit Mehta
Guitars & Bass: Naval Katoch
Synth & FX: Soumyadeep Ghoshal
Drums: Priyam Srivastava
This new song will be available on all major streaming platforms, and as a download on the band’s Bandcamp page, where you can find the other previous singles we mentioned at the outset.
P.S. The Second Fovea provided us links to videos about the real Snake Island, and we’ll share those with you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q6VjTASV8I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_U3mmPZLJM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrtpMR458Y4
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