Chennai has always had strong musical sensibilities and a healthy appreciation of genre. With artists like the F16s or Skrat or anyone else, it has combated its relatively quiet live music scene and occasionally come out with some interesting releases. Jayanth is an artist who makes laid-back and relatively relaxed indie music with influences from electronica, downtempo and so on. His debut EP ‘Limefright’ came out last year and was a decent release; his new song and video for ‘English Garden’ broaden his sound, but his subject matter is rather serious (sort of).

‘English Garden’ is a collaboration between Jayanth and guitarist Joel Prithvi (who plays for Chennai’s Stevie Joe), but don’t let that fool you into thinking it is a palace of guitar-wankery. It’s not. There is a short and pretty sweet guitar solo that functions as the last third of the song and its ‘outro’, so to speak, but everything else is dominated by more background guitars, textures and Jayanth’s rather restrained voice. There’s not much in the way of vocal craziness, either; Jayanth never uses his voice for more than what is required, instead letting the instrumentation do most of the mood-building. He sings in a general sense about the state of the world and whatnot, which does sound kind of odd in the chill and woozy aesthetic ‘English Garden’ builds. But hey, feelings are feelings. It doesn’t take away from the fact that the track is correctly paced (just under three and a half minutes, which is about right), that guitar solo really is good, the electronic drum sounds are well chosen, and there’s a good level of production. The video (credited to Neil Pepin and Mukul Santhosh) is also pretty well edited and rather ‘slow’ in its pacing, not bombarding the viewer with fast cuts and so on but fitting the vibe of a song. If you’re into the whole electronic slow-paced genre, ‘English Garden’ is a great fit for you.