There’s a kind of confidence that comes with releasing a solo instrumental track and daring people to care. Amit Jain, the one man force behind philojain, has that confidence in abundance, and frankly, he’s earned it.
“Riff Raff” opens with sub-bass so thick you half expect your landlord to start banging on the ceiling. It is the kind of low end that doesn’t sit in the background being polite. It plants itself in the centre of the room and refuses to move, and everything that follows is built on top of it like some gloriously heavy architecture that nobody asked for but everybody needed.
philojain wears his influences loosely. You can hear Pantera’s ferocity in there, a bit of Lamb of God’s mechanical grind, the odd moment that drifts somewhere between Faith No More’s restless genre jumping and Pink Floyd’s more expansive tendencies. But none of that really matters because “Riff Raff” sounds like none of those bands. It sounds like philojain, which at this point is a sound worth paying attention to.
The track shifts constantly, lurching between technical guitar passages that demand your full concentration and slow, pulverising chord drops that feel genuinely physical. There’s no verse, no chorus, no safety net. Jain just builds and dismantles and builds again, and the whole thing moves with the kind of unpredictable energy that most bands with five members and a label budget never quite manage to pull off.
The fact that he recorded and produced the entire thing himself is either maddening or inspiring depending on your disposition. Probably both.
You can listen to “Riff Raff” here.