‘Overhung’, a four-piece Mumbai-based band, comprising Malayali Sujith Kumar on vocals, Howard Pereira on guitar, Sheldon Dixon on drums and Melroy Coelho on bass guitars, plays striking hard rock songs, occasionally spiked with the flavours of blues and funk.
Formed in 2010, the band was dubbed the ‘bringers of the party’ by Hard Rock Cafe for their electric live set and that tag line has stuck.
As a hard rock band, its attitude towards music in general is essentially simple. “We all like to party and to have fun.”
Interestingly, Sujith, who lives in the US, has brought home the title of 2013 local artist of the year - Baltimore. The award was given away by Shockwave magazine and also he got featured in the magazine.
On his inspiration, Sujith says, “Life is a party, the times you feel low are just hangovers. Get up and continue the party. I have heard quite a few bands from Kerala. In fact, one of my favourite bands is Avial and my inspiration is Suraj Jagan, a noted playback singer, who I think is easily the best rock vocalist in the country.”
The Mumbai-based band is now exploring hitherto uncharted waters. After rocking the music scene for three years, they are now working on their maiden full-length album, which is due for release in couple of months. And for this, they have already completed shooting two videos to incorporate in the album Moving A-head (working title).
Their first EP (Extended4Play) was released last year to rave reviews. The four-track album includes the tracks ‘Casual Bitch’, ‘Waiting’, ‘Waste’ and ‘You Think You’re So Cool’. With only a few hard rock bands in the country, ‘Overhung’ is keen to stay true to the spirit of the genre.
In spite of strong vocals and excellent guitar riffs in each song, the diverse musical backgrounds like classic rock, metal,and funk, of the band members helps the band to create a curious mix of sounds in their songs .
“We have already started working on our upcoming album. The album has two videos which will be out by May end. We plan to incorporate 10 songs in our new album, including the four songs on our EP. Soon after the launch we will be going on an all-India tour,” says an elated Howard.
Ayan De, under the banner of Midicore, will produce their album. The band has been creating videos for the songs ‘Casual Bitch’ and ‘Waste’.
The video of ‘Waste’ focuses on creating awareness about women empowerment, female infanticide and the need for compulsory education for girls.
‘Casual Bitch’ is about casual sex. And it will obviously includes adult content. But at the same time, the video stresses on spreading awareness about ‘safe sex’. “We are hoping that people will notice it. We got 5,000 to 6,000 downloads within a few months of the release of the EP. We really hope that the new album will be a hit like the EP,” says Howard.
So how did the idea of forming a band come up? “The idea of forming ‘Overhung’ is a bit strange,” says vocalist Sujith Kumar.
“I was looking for musicians to record a song that I had written previously. Then I met up with Howard and then Sheldon and Melroy, who were playing together with another band, ‘Dream Out Loud’ which had just disbanded at the time. We started listening to the song I wanted to record and meanwhile, Howard was playing some random stuff on the guitar and suddenly I started singing along. This finally became a whole new song,” quips Sujith, who is fondly known as Markujitsu.
“Around that time, Hard Rock Cafe, a famous pub in Mumbai, wanted a band to play for a couple of gigs and I coaxed the other guys to start a band. We rehearsed for the gig and we had good chemistry and thus was formed ‘Overhung’,” says Sujith.
“We always wanted to write and play our own music rather than covers and it was all fitting together perfectly. Within a very short period we were playing all original set and the crowd loved the stuff. So we decided to record that and distribute it for free through the internet,” says Sujith Kumar.