Checkpoint, like the first album of The Unseen Guest, beautifully weaves two influences into a seamless whole. The instrumentation combines bluesy melodies (check out the harmonica work of Curtis King on Miracle Mile) with elements from pop, folk, rock and free jazz. To describe the album as a combination of the best of eastern and western musical styles would not be an exaggeration. The album closes with an excellent rendition of Leonard Cohen's Everybody Knows, which is familiar yet new, with a beautiful string arrangement.

It is only on a second listening that the listener realizes that some of the album's sounds are distinctively Indian - percussion instruments like the dholaks on Ancient Greek, and the gan-jra on the Whitest Lie. The tablas pop nicely, the sax is rich and one can feel the dusty roads of India in Declan's voice. The listener gets a continual variety of pleasant surprises through-out!

Imagine a jailhouse where you're always free...

 

THE UNSEEN GUEST: Checkpoint

Miracle Mile
Dont't Let It Show
Love Song #10
Black Hole
The Whitest Lie
Place Your Bets
Ancient Greek
Reduce It To A Kiss
Snowstorm
Conga Line
Everybody Knows

=> listen here

At times world weary, at times full of joy, Checkpoint is a traveller's diary, full of witnessed dualities and memories recorded on the spur of the moment. Not the cliches of East and West, but the stuff of novels and good movies: wanderlust versus security, love versus cyni-cism, the wildness of Saturday night and the regrets of Sunday morning.

Checkpoint is an apt title for the Unseen Guest's second album. With it, Declan and Amith acknowledge the successful musical territory of their first album - but they keep moving forward. A solid collection of eleven songs, Checkpoint combines the best of two (or more) worlds. The Unseen Guest have produced yet another beautiful dusty snapshot of life on the road, one you can sing and dance to!

Checkpoint by the Unseen Guest: Two men, two countries, one fine album!

 

The Unseen Guest make music that is difficult to pin down. Wedding traditional Indian instruments with Western song-writing and guitar, and covering it with rich vocal harmonies, they apply this basic idea to songs that come from every end of the spectrum - sounding sometimes like a mix of American folk blues and Carnatic music, sometimes like a Parisian taking on Nick Drake, at others like Buena Vista by way of Mumbai. They manage to incorporate Western music with traditional Indian instruments in a way that makes it genuinely new, avoiding patchouli-scented cliche or Bollywood bombast.

The Unseen Guest came about when, Declan met Amith while he was travelling through South India in 2002 with a $5 balsa-wood guitar. The two became friends and met again in Mumbai where Amith was based, where they spent several weeks jamming, busking and singing to anyone who'd listen.

Later in the year, while Declan was still on the road, Amith sent him an email, suggesting recording an album mixing Indian music with Western. Declan, busy working at the bottom rung of the Australian job ladder, was only too happy to accept. The following year they met up again in Amith's hometown of Calicut in Kerala, assembled a rotating cast of local musicians,and set to work on recording their debut album.

THE UNSEEN GUEST: Out There

Let Me In
In The Black
Anywhere Somewhere
Listen My Son
Mangla Express
Sandalista
Out There
Circle In The Dirt
One Down
Never Enough

The result is "Out There", a self-produced album that belies the freewheeling spirit it was made in, with a soul that shows its international origins, and a natural sound that doesn't sugar-coat the excellent live playing of its participants. With a percussive throb that is provided by Indian musicians playing everything from tablas, dholaks and mridangam, to mandolins, harmonium, veena, and carnatic violin, topped with the intricate guitars of Declan and Amith, the album melds left-field Western music with Indian in a way that has never been done before.


The Unseen Guest are:

Declan Murray - Lead vocals, guitars, slide guitar, bass guitar, piano and bongos
Amith Narayan - Harmony vocals, guitars, mandolin, veena and bass guitar


Additional musicians on "Out There":

Sumodh Sridhar - Tablas, mridangam, dholaks, ganjra, shakers & other Indian percussion
Anil Kumar - Bass dholak, ghadam, edakka, thavil, mridangam and chimes
Joy - Banjo and mandolin on "Listen my son" and "Mangla Express"
Shah Jahan Wadiyal - Violins and string arrangements on "Let me in"
Lajoo G - Harmonica on "One down"
Sunil Bhasker - Harmonium on "Out there"