Kitanu’s Sarod-Prog Blend Shines on ‘I Don’t Feel A Thing’

New Delhi rock act Kitanu’s not-so-secret weapon is sarod artist Rohan Prasanna and their new song “I Don’t Feel A Thing” heaps on the heavy to all-out progressive rock.

The second release with drummer-producer Rijul Victor aka Corridors on board builds on the energy of their previous single “How The Tables Turn” and gets even groovier. Thematically, the band says the title and the lyrics come from a conversation that vocalist Siddhant Sarkar had with “a girl who said she suffered from and was diagnosed with psychopathic tendencies.”

The band adds in a press release, “She claimed she doesn’t feel emotions like guilt, joy, misery, anger on the same spectrum like other people – and while talking about this somewhere in the conversation specifically said the words ‘I don’t feel a thing,’ which led to the name of the song.”

While their previous song clocked in at seven minutes, “I Don’t Feel A Thing” packs in the punch much quicker with a four-minute runtime. As things get heavier on the track, Prasanna’s sarod stays rooted in classical phrasing, making Kitanu sound like few others in Indian music.

The band says in the press release that the tapping portion heard in the intro was originally written by guitarist Omkar Raghupatruni in 2016. “[It] was, in fact, the first riff he wrote on the guitar, one he would randomly play from time to time… the first half of that riff led to laying the base of this song over which [bassist] Pranav Wahi played a progression and Rijul laid the groove for it,” they add.

Speaking about the technicalities of the track, Kitanu add, “Originally written on a 4/4 time signature, the band proceeded to write it on a 3/4 time signature with the sarod phrasing playing using rhythmic displacement, where the melody is repeated twice [and] the second time it’s played off-time but eventually catches up to be in time by the end of the cycle.”

As Prasanna’s sarod interlude ends, “I Don’t Feel A Thing” kicks into soaring rock courtesy of Raghupatruni’s guitar solo. “The guitar solo is aimed to be a serene melody in contrast to the turbulent chaos hence a delicate Indian classical alaap within the intense energy of a hard rock-inspired djent section,” the band adds.