Prateek Kuhad’s new EP cold/mess begins with the sound of xylophones moving up and down the scale. Gathering momentum, they evoke blue skies, winter sunshine and other concentrated doses of endorphin. This is power that we have allowed xylophones, glockenspiels and balafons to wield, a shift from the aesthetic to the Pavlovian. We’ve done this to live in a world with dream pop, where folks like Sigur Ros, M83 or The Cocteau Twins can make the weird lullabies-for-grown-ups they’re so good at making.

Like a Don DeLillo novel, atmosphere is everything with dream pop and Kuhad’s cold/mess (the song as well as the EP) does not disappoint — building on its opening xylo-burst, the song envelops you in a cosy, sing-along, slow-dance embrace. Kuhad’s refrain on this track is simple, hummable and retains just enough pathos — a classic hook, whichever way you slice it.

“I wish I could leave you my love but my heart’s a mess/ My days they begin with your name and nights end with your breath.”

In a recent GQ interview, Kuhad placed cold/mess as a breakup album while also talking about the great love songs down the ages in the same breath, from Paul Simon and Bob Dylan to Adele and Ed Sheeran. As a musician friend pointed out to me recently, it is a fallacy to look at love songs and breakup songs as discrete categories — they exist on the same spectrum, operate in the same sphere of heightened realism and are similar in their aesthetic manipulations. The six tracks on cold/mess move across this spectrum at a sedate, self-aware pace.

For Your Time is the most rose-tinted song on this EP. The art for this song is a ’70s couple kissing with shades on, literally filtered through a vivid red (each song has a different kissing couple as album art). And even though the lyrics acknowledge time’s nostalgia-flattening ways (“I was young, I was taken and in time, forsaken”), the music itself feeds off a certain giddy optimism, with the drums sounding like they were sampled from a ’70s folk rock song. 100 Words sees Kuhad in his comfort zone — a simple, adorable acoustic tune elevated by buttery vocals.

There is no doubt that Kuhad’s confidence in his core melodies is growing at the rate of knots, enabling him to sample different sections of the indie playbook. So much so that, musically, the most ambitious track here is the one with the most simplistic lyrics — Do you/ fall apart . The xylophones, exuberant elsewhere on cold/mess , are muted here, even plaintive. When Kuhad sings the minimalist lyrics (there are not more than five or six lines here, all dovetailing back to the “when you took my heart”) it feels as if the hook is emanating from pure muscle memory. The accompanying art is an eerie, Magritte-like image of a couple kissing, their faces obscured by cloth; a fine choice for an enigmatic song.

The Fighter is a straight-up angst song where Kuhad does some of his best vocal work, handheld by a folksy-yet-anthemic drum. Rounding off proceedings is with you/ for you , destined to be a concert classic for its easygoing, sing-along quality.

To sum up, there is much to enjoy, unpack and/or obsess over in cold/mess . And yet — or perhaps this only pricks because of how accomplished cold/mess is — a niggling anxiety persists about the future direction of indie music in India. This has to do with what one might call the Wes Anderson Effect. In May 2017, Parekh & Singh released the video for a track called ‘Ghost’. Inspired by Moonrise Kingdom and several other Anderson films, the video featured precocious children, an outdoor adventure and poker-faced men in pastel-coloured suits. Not long after, the music video for Kuhad’s Jab Paas was released, and the Anderson handprints were not tough to spot. On Dil Beparvaah , Kuhad even appears riding a comically large bicycle in immaculate hipster wear.

Well documented critiques of Anderson may soon be extended to those taking his cue in India. The neurotic, emotionally stunted protagonists of his films operate via dream logic, valuing whimsy over pragmatism. They are also unencumbered by geography or temporality — Anderson characters down the years have been islands, seemingly unaffected by time or space, simply because they are in thrall of their own visions, their carefully crafted escape plans that hold reality at bay. But who gets this chance to escape reality? Who gets to hum a folksy song while getting over heartbreak in colour-coordinated rooms?

These are important questions, but just a little bit wasted on Anderson because he is neither a moralist nor a realist that way. The indie music darlings who have embraced Andersonland, however, need to figure out if these are questions they are interested in. They’d do well to remember the ambiguity of their lyrics. Words turn on you eventually. They always do.

The refrain in cold/mess , for instance (“I wish I could leave you my love...”), reads just as well as a drug addict’s cry for help, doesn’t it now?

Aditya Mani Jha works at Penguin Random House India

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