If you're a rock music fan from Bangalore and tend to hang around on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Tumblr, Flickr, Quickr, Fuckr, Rapr, and your other retarded attention whoring internet tools, you’ve most probably come across Parachute XVI in the past year or so.

Formed by a couple of guys who’ve been in the local scene for over a decade each, this band has not only smartly used all these social engines to spread the word, but also employed traditional PR channels to pretty decent effect. So, what do you do when you’ve played out the local venues to death? You step out of your city’s comfort zone and play to a new audience, that’s what. Don’t want to bore your core audience by playing the same shit over and over, after all. These guys apparently had the same thought, and went as far up north as Nepal to perform in front of a bunch of hippies. The next logical step for any start-up band is to record and put something out for people to check out, and turns out, these guys are still with me here. This means I finally get to hear what the internet hoopla (and Facebook group invite spam) is all about, which brings us to the point - Hello, Windows Media Player, which I don’t know why I’m still using.

Sodium Trail (And the Current Beantown Voice) begins with a heavily Traffic influenced Walk: Rewind, complete with lush keyboards. The jammy instrumental section occurs a bit abruptly, but I must admit it works in a weird way. Tight bass grooves and psychedelic as fuck keyboard layers, time signatures and changes a la 70s prog – that’s what we have here and through the other songs as well.

60 Watt Sun’s got a very cool bluesy intro/verse followed by - wait for it - a completely random rasta moment. The vocal melodies are old school and solid, but can we get some good guitar tones next time, please? I can understand this is a demo of sorts, but this digital as fuck overdrive is a bit of a deterrent, to put it mildly. Moving on, it’s kind of strange how these guys write songs. You have proper intros and vocal melodies you can sing along to, and then they go jamming halfway through, not always coming back for a full resolution. Same story with the next one, titled 05-04, except this time they manage to come back swiftly after the midway jam/solo section. This tune probably has the best vocal melody of the lot, so it was worth getting back there. The lead guitar has a pretty damn good motif going during the coda. If only the other solos on the album were consistently as memorable.

The first minute of the album closer, Mobius’ Trip, is so fucking familiar that I could hum along during the first time I heard this. Help me out here ... Steve Morse Band? This is good while it’s still in that territory, though. Where it loses steam is when the guitarist is supposed to cut loose, and I could’ve especially done without those faux-carnatic moments sneaked in there.

Parachute XVI are definitely off to a promising start, and are probably way better live than they're represented here, but they do need some fine tuning of their overall songwriting direction, and while they're at it, they probably could add to the line-up a lead guitarist who can rip and a drummer who can cut loose, which should hopefully add some much needed rock n roll swagger to the mix. Please RT.

Year of Release: 2009

Label: Self