MUSIC: Delhi 2 Dublin dreams of taking fusion sound to India

Vancouver band Dehli 2 Dublin. Submitted photo

Last August, Delhi 2 Dublin released its fourth full-length album.

Turn Up the Stereo did something previous releases by the band, which plays the Commodore Ballroom Friday, Nov. 30, never quite managed. It moved the quintet’s popular stew of Celtic, bhangra and EDM fusion to another level with the best songwriting and sonic landscapes that D2D ever laid down in studio.

Vocalist Sanjay Seran says that has always been the plan.

“Our earlier albums were really great little souvenirs of the show, something of the live experience for you to take home with you,” says Seran.
“But, honestly, I think that there were really only about four or five truly excellent songs over all of them.

“This time around, we needed songs and realized that we didn’t really know how to do that to the level that we wanted. So we went to the guys we knew who could get us there.”

Enter Grammy Award-winning producer Chin Injeti and rock-writer guy Dave Genn to up the hook count in new tunes such as the ballad Love Is The Hero, mission statement opener Our House and others.

It was an interesting transition for the band – DJ Tarun Nayar, guitarist/electric sitarist Andrew Kim, dhol/tabla player Ravi Binning, fiddler Sara Fitzpatrick and Seran.

While it might have been a challenge letting some of the control over the music-making go to people œoutside the family,” the singer says that the knowledge gained watching someone with Injeti’s expertise will certainly rub off on future sessions.

Seran says he’s not afraid of writing tunes that stick in your head such as Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. A great song is a great song, with some exceptions.

“There is a lot of formula in pop music and we were very wary of falling into that trap of writing something like a Katy Perry tune that wasn’t Delhi 2 Dublin.

“But we came through it really intact and now have a true sense of how to write and work a song from those initial good ideas into something much stronger.”

College radio and some select markets have been very positive about the new album. Although, once again, D2D finds its hard to classify music-jumping genres from world beat to EDM now.

This is why the group really makes its lasting impressions playing in front of an audience. Something about seeing the quintet in action makes
listeners realize that it is a band, a beat factory, a jig generator and a party-rocking crew all in one.

Averaging 150-plus shows a year across North America, D2D is now venturing into Europe and played its first shows in Asia last year. The dream of taking the music to India lives large.

“Getting there with this group of people would be so incredible. But you really can’t tour there without a major sponsor because there just isn’t the same kind of infrastructure.

“You are either massive, like Iron Maiden or Roger Waters, playing one or two arenas only. Otherwise, you need someone to underwrite it and a lot of the time that might be a cigarette company, which we won’t do.”

As he notes, when it happens, it’s going to be huge. Things happen for the band when they do. It has to be a natural process.