Beat The Devil has just been down South. Fresh back from a week-long jaunt that took them as far as Georgia, bassist Mishka Shubaly slouches in a corner of the band’s tiny Greenpoint practice space, lit by a single, moody red bulb overhead, and tells weird tales of things afoot below the Mason-Dixon.
“The place was like the Roadhouse in Beetlejuice,” he says of the Charlotte, N.C., venue with slanted floors and graffed-up walls. It was part of the stuffy, barely-functioning van tour on which the three-piece “almost broke even.”
The locale described is essentially the sort evoked by Beat the Devil’s lyrics, a world which vocalist and songwriter Shilpa Ray fills with pedophiles, demons and even the fabled Solomon Grundy, whose titular poem she condenses into the opening verse of “Raging Bull Blues,” describing Grundy’s swift journey from birth to death between a Monday and a Sunday.
Ray’s lyrics tend toward the engagingly bizarre, and her world twists so sharply that as quickly as she professes to having “gone crazy” in “Plea Bargain,” she skews logic and sanity further, asking the listener, in a fervent bellow, “So what’s wrong with crazy?”.
And it’s quite a bellow. Growing up in New Jersey, Ray’s strict Hindu parents (Western music was forbidden) had her take traditional Indian voice lessons starting at six years old; her unique vocal style combines that training with a bluesy knowingness, and together they produce high shrieks and low moans in the same emotionally-charged breath.
Though Ray’s voice would easily be enough to carry the trio, their songs, particularly on their five-song, eponymous debut EP, inhabit the ether—brimming with cinematic flair (perhaps not coincidentally, Beat the Devil takes its name from a 1950s mock noir starring Humphrey Bogart). Shubaly’s steady, circular bass lines and the recording’s insistent, if even-tempered, percussion (the group is rounded out by drummer Mitchell King, though he joined after the EP was recorded) anchor the floating chords that Ray spews from her harmonium, a hand-pumped organ and remnant of her upbringing: “It’s what you are given when you’re taking Indian voice lessons,” Ray states matter-of-factly. Her instrument, billowing evocative major and minor chord atmospherics, is more than a gimmick; it’s an approach to harmony that most guitarists long ago dismissed in search of hokier wares.
With recording wrapping up on a full-length (“We have 15 songs that we’re working on,” Ray reports), and a certain indifference about obtaining legitimacy anywhere other than smoke-filled clubs out on the road—“We can do it ourselves,” Shubaly shrugs, when asked about maybe signing to a label—it’s time for Beat the Devil to leave behind their current nine-to-five crutches and drive the van, “‘til the wheels come off.”
And the beneficiary will be the unaware concertgoer, hearing Shilpa Ray pump her harmonium, listening to her sing in surprisingly unsnarled timbre for most of “Raging Bull Blues” about bloody noses and torn skin, only for her to suddenly shred her vocal chords in the song’s latter half; the way she’ll sing those nonsense pop syllables—“ba dada dat dada dada dat da!”—all throaty rasp and venomous bite, they might think she’s crazy.
So what’s wrong with crazy?
July 13, South Street Seaport, 19 Fulton St. (at South St.), 212-732-7678; 8, free.
