A measured leap into the visual
Climax is a nice dinner at the India Habitat Centre in one of their members-only restaurants; a live band plays in the back while an aaya swaddles a neglected baby on the side. It’s that time spent sitting on the sofa in a hotel lobby as rich, good-looking, good-smelling people pass by with big red bags. A drive in an air-conditioned Ambassador with mini-curtains on the windows around central Delhi, passing the many monuments and tombs around town. Or a wintry stroll through the streets of the Walled City.
Climax, essentially, is vivid in its ability to suggest storyboarded visual scenes. The comforting familiarity of the music — jazz soaked in a waltzy, big band cabaret brew — settles in that spot between the background and right up front. It hints at activity of some sort, laidback as it may be. Not classist — even though, in India, jazzy music and all its offshoots (experimental or hybrid as they may be) have traditionally been the preserve of the relatively rich, welleducated or well-travelled — but aspirational at best, toward simplicity and minimal fuss. And even that is an inference about the metaphysical quality of the music, not necessarily projected by the band.
The eight-song record is a distant, fantastical envelope around a modern reality that Peter Cat Recording Co. imagine, lo-fi and crackling in parts — muffled whispers of band members chatting in the background find their way into the mix (on Copulations) — and triumphant and carefree in others, as on the live-recorded Portrait of a Time.
Horns and strings make occasional appearances, establishing fringe activity around the soft, droopy guitar-and- jazzy-drum dynamic, where even the frantic sections are earmarked by swaying, unused pockets to lend a sense of space and breathing room. Sitting right in the centre, even if the production intentionally tries to push them toward the back, are the vocals — deep, baritone-ish, and almost weary; it’s this subdued delivery, yet affecting and powerful, that crafts a sense of urgency to the album. It’s not too drastic a leap from the established Peter Cat sound — it doesn’t aim to be either, on early listens — but Climax asserts a distinct aesthetic quality about it.