Jan 212011
 

One week ago, we posted a piece by NCS contributor Siddharth Darbha introducing us (and many of you) to an Indian metal band called Scribe. You can read Siddharth’s article here. Siddharth noted that Scribe’s 2010 album, Mark of Teja, had been nominated for Best Album at the 2010 edition of The Jack Daniel’s Rock Awards.

By way of background, this is the sixth year for those awards, which are organized in association with Rolling Stone (India) magazine. This year, 280 entries were submitted for the 16 award categories, including Song of the Year, Band of the Year, and Album of the Year. The editors of Rolling Stone whittled the list down to five nominees in each category, and those were then presented to a nine-member jury of judges. The award winners were decided by a combination of weighted jury votes and popular votes on a specially created web site. Bear in mind that the nominees for each award came from a range of genres — not limited, for example, to extreme metal.

Last night, the awards were announced at a live event at The Hard Rock Cafe in Mumbai. And guess what? Scribe pretty much ran the table, winning the Popular Choice awards for Song of the Year (“1234 Dracula”) and Album of the Year, as well as the Critics’ Choice Awards for Song of the Year and Band of the Year. Scribe’s Srinivas Sunderrajan also won the Bassist of the Year award. For all the results, go here.

Congratulations to Scribe for carrying the flag of Indian metal to the top of the heap — and congrats also to Demonic Resurrection for winning the Popular Choice award for Band of the Year. Pretty damn cool to see two metal bands like this being named Band of the Year against competitors from “more accessible” genres.

And along the same lines, did you know that on Monday of this week none other than Watain‘s album Lawless Darkness won the Swedish version of the Grammy award for “Best Hard Rock” Album of the Year? It did. “Hard rock” clearly means something different in Sweden than it does in the U.S. Holy shit.

Jan 142011
 

EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve been hearing the name Scribe repeatedly since we started exploring Indian metal last year, so we asked our contributor from India, Siddharth Darbha, if he would give us an introduction to the band and its discography — and he obliged, with the following post.

Scribe is a box full of fun-filled pink chocolate confetti hiding a venomous snake beneath its contents. Yeah, that’s what Scribe is.

One of the most original bands found in this era, Scribe is not just two guitars, a bass, a throat, a drum kit and five pseudo-humans. No, definitely not Scribe. A concoction of auditory mutilations, pseudo glitter-infected personae and temporal hallucinations; that’s more like what Scribe has meant to the Indian crowd since its debut offering Have Hard. Will Core., which came out in 2005. A super-group of sorts, they took the nation hostage, winning quite a few national competitions and audiences all around.

Sounding like a not-so-distant progeny of SikTh, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and other mind-enhancing drugs, they incorporate a wide variety of genres into their play. As their debut EP suggests, hardcore is one of them. Frequently setting up djent tones, they also use electronic music. Time signatures fly here and there, but that is not what Scribe is about. Like the music of SikTh, the songs often feel like they are a part of something larger.   (more after the jump, including music . . .) Continue reading »