Over the past 14 years, Indian indie-rock veterans have perfected their own particular style of fusion. They travel across time and geography, plundering sounds and aesthetics—early-20th-century cabaret, 1950s vocal jazz, 1960s soul, 1970s Bollywood, and early-2000s indie rock—and assembling these transcultural artifacts into improbable collages, warping their references’ familiarity into something more subversive, and occasionally a little sinister. They follow that blueprint to excellent effect on “People Never Change,” the lead single off their latest album, .
The dholak and iktara that kick things off suggest the sort of earthy Punjabi folk pop that is inescapable at North Indian weddings, then feint left by adding sub-aquatic bass synth and jazz saxophone. The song constantly mutates, weaving a dizzying, six-and-a-half-minute path through funk, disco, bossa nova, and psychedelia. But though they borrow heavily from previous eras, PCRC are driven by the urge to move forward, rousing the ghosts of the past to interrogate the fault lines of the present, both personal and political.
Such creative restlessness has always been central to the PCRC ethos, especially in the years they spent gestating in the Indian rock underground. Their catalog is full of abrupt left turns: from cinematic cabaret-punk to surrealistic soundscapes of noise and found sound, from psychedelic slow waltzes to mutant amalgamations of guitar drone and -esque trumpet. The only constants have be.