Why I’d Rather Watch Shillong’s Metal Bands Wage War in Underground Gigs Than Listen to Another Cover Band Murder an ’80s Love Ballad

 By Patrick P. Sawian

  

 

There comes a point in every Shillong musician’s life when one must make a spiritual decision. Will one descend into the sweaty basements of underground metal gigs where young musicians are trying desperately to invent tomorrow’s sound, or sit politely at another café listening to a middle-aged cover band perform “Hotel California” for the 94,000th time while couples sip cold coffee and stare meaningfully into each other’s unresolved emotional baggage? I chose the former.

Not because every metal band in Shillong is technically perfect. Far from it. Some of them sound like Meshuggah colliding with a broken mixer,  Slayer trapped inside a cement factory or Dream Theater after surviving a traumatic head injury but at least they are trying. And in a music culture increasingly trapped inside the embalmed museum of nostalgic soft-rock karaoke, effort toward originality itself becomes an act of rebellion. I usually do this to escape The Tyranny of the Sacred Cover Song. Shillong’s music scene often behaves like a civilization permanently trapped between Valentine’s Day, FM radio from 1997 and an emotionally confused Bryan Adams tribute night. Everywhere one goes another Eagles cover, another Scorpions ballad, another “Summer of ’69,” performed with such sacred seriousness one would think the chords had descended from Mount Sinai. The city’s obsession with retro comfort music has become so institutionalized that one suspects some musicians emerged from the womb already wearing denim jackets and singing “More Than Words.”.  Listen, nostalgia has its place but when an entire music ecosystem becomes dependent on recycling emotional leftovers from four decades ago, creativity slowly suffocates beneath familiarity. At some point, a music culture must ask are we musicians?
Or are we human Spotify playlists for weddings and cafés?

        This is where the beautiful chaos of underground metal comes in. This is precisely why Shillong’s underground metal scene remains far more exciting because even when the bands fail — they fail ambitiously. You hear strange time signatures, awkward progressive experiments, death-metal riffs stitched to folk passages, black-metal atmospherics, technical thrash sections, djent influences, odd harmonic ideas and occasional moments of accidental genius and all that matters to me.  Art evolves through dangerous experimentation, not through perfectly reproducing Bon Jovi songs while the audience debates appetizer menus.  A young guitarist trying unsuccessfully to invent a new riff has infinitely more artistic value than someone flawlessly replaying “Nothing Else Matters” for the 800th time beside fairy lights and Valentine balloons.

Shillong’s underground ecosystem has produced genuinely intriguing bands and musicians over the years — bands willing to move beyond comfort music and into risk.  Among the names often associated with experimentation and heavier evolution are Adremelech, Wired Ground, Plague Throat, Dymbur and Third Sovereign. Some lean toward technicality. Some toward groove. Some toward progressive experimentation. Some toward sonic violence bordering on organized demolition work. But collectively they represent something vital - a tribe of musicians attempting to escape the gravitational pull of Shillong’s endless retro-love-ballad industrial complex. And that is where future greatness often begins. Not in perfection, but in refusal.

Why do metal scenes produce innovation? Historically, nearly every major leap in modern guitar-driven music came from scenes willing to sound strange before sounding acceptable. Progressive metal. Technical death metal. Math rock.
Avant-garde jazz fusion. Extreme experimental rock. All initially sounded ridiculous to mainstream ears. The musicians who eventually changed music were usually not the safest performers in the room. They were the awkward obsessives experimenting recklessly in tiny venues while everyone else laughed. Shillong’s underground metal musicians may not yet possess global virtuoso status comparable to Sweden, Germany, or the United States. But what they do possess is something more important - creative restlessness and and that is infinitely more valuable than polished stagnation.

Now let us get into the problem with comfort music culture.  Much of Shillong’s mainstream live-music ecosystem rewards familiarity, nostalgia, crowd comfort and emotional predictability. This creates musicians who become extraordinarily skilled at recreating the past but rarely at inventing the future. The city sometimes behaves as though musical excellence means “Can you reproduce a 1980s song accurately enough for intoxicated uncles to nod approvingly?”. That is not artistry. That is cultural taxidermy.  Meanwhile underground musicians are downstairs trying to create sounds nobody fully understands yet. One group earns polite applause. The other risks humiliation searching for originality. History usually remembers the second group.

The amusing irony is that many musical ideas initially dismissed as noise eventually become institutionalized decades later. Jazz once scandalized polite society. Heavy metal was once considered barbaric. Progressive music was mocked as self-indulgent nonsense. Today universities analyze them academically, which is why I would not be surprised if someday certain experimental musicians emerging from Shillong’s underground scene produce work genuinely worthy of study be they unusual rhythmic structures, hybrid tribal influences, progressive arrangements, experimental harmonic ideas, or uniquely northeastern sonic identities fused into metal. The probability of discovering tomorrow’s revolutionary music inside underground experimentation is vastly higher than discovering it inside Café Love Ballad Night #417.

So yes, I would much rather stand inside a cramped underground venue watching half-feral young metal musicians attempt to summon musical chaos from malfunctioning amplifiers than sit through another evening of sanitized romantic nostalgia performed by cover bands embalming the same five radio decades cycled through a mundane three to four chords in 4/4.

Yes, creativity is messy. Innovation is awkward. Originality is often embarrassing before it becomes extraordinary and somewhere inside Shillong’s underground metal noise, beneath the blast beats, the technical excess, the distortion, and the glorious confusion, there are musicians trying to crawl out of the mundane box of predictable comfort music. That tribe matters because even if many fail, they are at least attempting something infinitely more important than nostalgia. They are trying to create the future instead of endlessly replaying the past.