You know what they say about the family who dance together...
OK, maybe no one says anything about such a clan, but Tarun Nayar of Delhi 2 Dublin mentioned to the Shank Hall audience assembled Wednesday night for his band’s seventh Milwaukee appearance since 2006 that the bond between his group and their faithful fans in the city's like one of blood relation. Relatives who get along especially well and don't mind shaking their stuff in front of each other, that is.
Especially shaking were those toward the front of the stage, where D2D's frequent orgies of polyrhythms were met in kind with furious movements of empathy and appreciation from those willing to cut a rug... virtually into shreds.
The East Indian/Irish fusion conceit of the D2D's name remains strong eight years into their cross cultural mission. Nayar's electronic bhangra beats (with occasional sitar samples) and tablas combine with Ravi Binning creating an aural maelstrom on both ends of his dhol, to which violinist Serena Eades fiddles jig and reel melodies that often enough bear some resemblance to a Bollywood spectacle's interstitial music.
Yet D2D have expanded upon the original basis of their aesthetic foundation. The most brazen example of that joyous blurring occurred in a lengthy instrumental around the middle of their 16 numbers, sounding as it did like an instrumental B-side for as 12-inch single from English ’90s dance-oriented alt rockers Republica.
A goodly contribution to that piece's sound comes from the band member who essentially bridges ensemble's ethnic bridge with rock. Guitarist James Hussain may resemble a lost, uber-nerdy, highly coiffed member of '70s U.K. new wavers The Fabulous Poodles, but his tonal variety exhibited in an array of melodic and solo contributions prove him to be at least as fierce a player as his cohorts beating skins with sticks and hands.
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Singer Sanjay Seran offers an amiable, yearningly sincere front man presence, but lyrically, he seems like a more ideologically amorphous Michael Franti with a penchant for herbal self-medication. A little ganja toking, calls to revolution (to what ends?) and some self-affirmation mantras make up a good deal of his couplets and they may sound at least a bit less puerile when he presents them in Hindi and what may be a bit of Spanish. To his credit, Seran comes off respectably as a rapper in one of the new songs with which they encored.
But again, words seem a secondary consideration with music powerfully danceable as that purveyed by this Vancouver quintet. That there were some in attendance drenched in sweat by the end their set testified to what is arguably Delhi 2 Dublin's greatest strength.
