Tipping The Scales

Why Adam and the Fish Eyed Poets is every Indian indie music blog's band to watch.

Kishore Krishna aka the Adam behind Adam and the Fish Eyed Poets.

If you’re a fan of Adam and the Fish Eyed Poets and are planning on attending their gig at Blue Frog tonight, know that they will be playing only two songs off their two much-acclaimed albums Snakeism and Dead Loops. The good news is that the rest of their set list will comprise all new, as-yet-unreleased material. If you haven’t yet heard Adam and the Fish Eyed Poets aka 23-year-old, Chennai-based singer-songwriter Kishore Krishna, we recommend that you open a new tab, visit his Bandcamp site and download those two aforementioned albums, both available for free, immediately.

Because if you like your pop music ever so askew, you’re unlikely to be disappointed by what you hear. Despite all the influences—and there are many (more on them later)—Adam and the Fish Eyed Poets is for all practical purposes a pop act, albeit a self-described “post-proto” one. How else do you describe an artist whose music traverses multiple landmarks in the evolution of modern popular music, from blues to country to punk to indie. (As far as we could tell, there’s no hip hop, or maybe there is, in the inherent violence that seems to dominate the songs, but it takes place not in the American ghetto but in an upper-middle class housing colony in an Indian metropolis.)

Shortly after Krishna released Snakeism in July 2010, he set Indian indie music blogs aflutter. It was hard to believe this was an “Indian” indie act, even more so that it was the work of a twenty-something chap who wrote, composed, played all the instruments (guitar, bass, synthesizer) and recorded all his songs in his bedroom in Chennai—of all places. Fortunately, Krishna, whose music frequently bears a macabre feel, is good at explaining himself. Along with providing the lyrics to the songs on his Bandcamp pages, he’s also helpfully tagged a few tracks with the subjects that inspired them. Doo-wop ditty “I Will Follow” for instance is tagged “faith”, “religion” and “suicide bombers”.

Krishna has however denied that Dead Loops opener “Purgatory City” is about Chennai. Yet it’s obvious that a lot of the vitriol that seems to permeate through his tunes is inspired by his hometown, and that the characters and situations he creates and sings about were born out of the ennui of urban life in a place where it seems there’s nothing much to do besides watch films, read, while away hours at the beach and of course, listen to music. “There undeniably is an intrinsically Indian/Chennai voice in the stories I’m telling…the local teashop wit and bile has surely seeped in by now,” said Krishna whose Mumbai gig will feature a backing band of drummer Prabhu Muralee, and guitarists/bassists Nischint Murari and Abhinav Krishnaswamy

As for those influences, they range from folk/rock singer-songwriter icons like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen and Nick Cave, country superstars like Hank Williams, Buck Owens and Johnny Cash,  blues legends like Howlin’ Wolf and Skip James, punk heroes like Patti Smith, Television and Nick Cave to post-punk pioneers such as Joy Division, The Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen and alternative rock greats such as The Smiths, REM and Radiohead, and even pop geniuses like David Bowie and Prince.

It’s possible to spot many of these influences in Krishna’s songs—and maybe it’s also got to do with his gravelly vocals that can reach both sombre lows and desperate highs—but the one act that he most reminds us of is Springsteen. “Acid Facial”, written from the point of view of a man who decides to teach the woman who rejected him a lesson, in fact sounds like the Boss backed by The Smiths. But what many listeners miss, Krishna says, is “the massive surf (50s and modern) meets [seminal American R&B record label] Stax influence in the first half of Dead Loops. I wanted the Beach Boys, Best Coast, Roy Orbison mashing up with Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett etc.,” he said. “The second half was a response to [Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album] Nebraska and all the [Scottish folk singer] Bert Jansch [songs] I was listening to back then.”

If anything, Dead Loops, released in May 2011, is a darker record than Snakeism. “Snakeism was pretty much a response to a messy break up so it’s got a lot of forced swagger and intensity,” said Krishna. “Dead Loops on the other hand is all about subtle, death-black humour/irony in the face of complete powerlessness. Also, Snakeism was an affirmation of sorts for fringe dwellers battling circumstance and shit. But Dead Loops was focused on white-collar scum, politicians, small business owners, housewives etc…folks that have conformed/sold out and are trying to figure out ‘what next’?”

The musical influences, it would seem, only tell half the tale. Krishna is equally inspired by the filmmakers and authors he brands “fish eyed poets” or those individuals, he told Indianrockmp3.com, “living with 180 degree vision in a world designed for/by people with 150 degree sight”. That list, he told us, includes Kurt “Vonnegut, Henry Miller, [Charles] Bukowski, [French poets Charles] Baudelaire and [Paul] Verlaine, and I guess [Ernest] Hemingway’s economy was crucial too.” He said, “But songwriting requires extreme compression and economy so when I think back, I guess I got that from accidentally reading people like [Anton] Chekov back when I was way too young to understand it all and then obviously cinema…[Krzysztof] Kieslowski’s [1989 Polish TV series] The Decalogue had the most profound impact on me as a writer…also Woody Allen…massive.”

The inclusion of Allen suggests that not all of Krishna’s humour is black. When we asked him why he chose to name himself Adam, he replied, “I needed something with connotations to solitude/isolation so it was the first thing that came to mind. The second was Tarzan…so I decided to stick with Adam.”

Adam and the Fish Eyed Poets will perform at Blue Frog tonight, Tuesday, January 10, at a gig that will also feature Blackstratblues.

Blue Frog

LocationMathuradas Mills Compound
Tulsi Pipe Road
Lower Parel

Phone6158 6158

Relevant DatesTuesday, January 10

Hours9.30pm

Ticketing & Price InfoRs300

Websitewww.bluefrog.co.in