Vh1 ‘s global music express initiative to bring a new artist to the stage every 45 days had its initiation so as to say, on the 21st of October at the lofty Mumbai Hard rock cafe. The first international act in Vh1’s arsenal to broaden the tastes of Mumbai’s fickly audience turned out to be golden boy multi instrumentalist Jayce Lewis whose single ‘Icon’ has been storming up the charts lately making him vh1’s artist of the month. He has come a long way since his four year tenure beating skins as the drummer of the Cardiff experimental metal band Losing Sun, a band which had a tendency to breeze through drummers, rivaled only by Pearl Jam and Spinal Tap, until their break up in 2008. Over his year as a solo musician he has developed a formidable sound, a dark and brooding tone that ebbs and flows with a seething electronic undercurrent that has become his trademark.
Fortunate enough to be opening for Jayce was local act Blue Blood, who in their own words were playing their first gig after 15 years together as a band. Despite being provided an incredible stage, they all but failed to deliver with an incessantly loud lower end and predictability that would probably benefit from brevity and delving more into experimentation saving the song structures from such monotony. Playing eight songs out of favor off a future album, they did manage to warm up the crowd for the main attraction who permitted the rise in anticipation, going on at exactly midnight.
Accompanied by a bassist, guitarist and a sampler equipped with the most advanced high end gadgetry, Jayce Lewis started off the adrenaline charged set with the previously mentioned Icon, a song characterized by choppy riffs complemented by catchy synth sounds and soaring vocal hooks clearly reflecting the influences of Prodigy, Depeche Mode and Killing Joke.
On stage he demonstrated why he was a force to be reckoned with within the rock world with indomitable stage presence and virtuosity as the performance saw him occasionally switching between instruments as he went through drums, guitars both acoustic and electric and keyboards during the course of a succession of songs off of his upcoming album ‘Chapter’.
Owing a debt to artists as diverse as Brian May of Queen and Kirk Hammett of Metallica, all the songs possessed a down and dirty feel with an underlying dark electronic touch a la the Deftones, still however retaining the ability to reach anthemic levels which perhaps hints at his crossover potential into stadium rock.
Lewis followed the show in Mumbai with performances in Delhi on 22nd, Bangalore on 23rd and Pune on 25th of October joined by home bred bands Circus, Bhoomi and Junkyard Groove respectively.
