The sound is straight out of the late 90s/early 2000s, when rock music was going through somewhat of a re-renaissance, a resurgence, a last gasp before nearly dying out at the altar of short, increasingly formulaic, dumbed-down pop music of the naughties.

Neon, a band first introduced to us in the fourth season of Pepsi Battle of the Bands, works with the retro-pop vibe that’s all the rage in western mainstream music nowadays. Having said that, as a band, they’ve always done grungy rock music but seem to always fall short of reaching their full potential. You know that with a few tweaks here and there, they can be so much more.

Unfortunately, Synth Govt, isn’t any different. It’s a song that seems to have the best intentions behind it — and there’s a lot that works — but it’s also entirely too predictable. This is a good start, but Neon can do better.

The introduction to Synth Govt, like a lot of resistance songs, is very predictable — the sound of sirens leads us into an electric lead guitar intro that’s literally an invitation to head bang from the start. The vocals, by lead singer Hamza Tariq Jamil, imitate a classic Western grunge style complete with, what can best be described as, a cat like yowl-growl mix.

Neon’s latest offering, Synth Nation, speaks about dysfunctional governance but lacks the songwriting skills to pull it off

So much about all of this throws me back into a time where I was trying to sneak into ‘underground’ rock concerts that a lot of school bands back in the day in Karachi played at. Except, the tragedy is that we’re not in school and Neon isn’t a college band, even if it sounds like one.

Because a lot of these bands came from an English-medium background and most of the media they were exposed to was purely Western, they struggled a lot with writing in Urdu. Often they just threw a few key words together, in the hopes that they would magically become art — that’s how I feel about the lyrics of Synth Nation. For anyone who doesn’t understand what Hamza is singing, the lyrics are also available as captions on their video on YouTube.

“F*** The Police! They come out at night like hyenas at the scent of blood, toying with their prey before sinking their gnarled teeth tearing flesh from bones,” posted the band, Neon, under the description of Synth Govt on YouTube. “F*** The System! The stench is unbearable, you think it’s someone else? Think again, it’s you. You are a cog in a machine, your sole purpose is to make it work like clockwork tick tock you’re disposable, time to replace the cog. The Will to Power! Carpe Diem, seize control. When the people educate the police on Laws meant to protect them, the people BECOME THE LAW.”

I had so many thoughts reading his. The band references American rap group NWA’s 1988 original song, later covered brilliantly by Rage Against the Machine, F*** The Police. But Synth Govt has none of the passion or even the lyrical poetry in its songwriting to make it even comparable. It doesn’t even come close.

The treatment of the video itself is a bit ‘different’. There is the narrow straight mobile-phone frame with footage drenched in predictable neon pink. But that’s where the video’s originality ends. A masked man looks over the Gotham-esque like city. Different mobile phone videos showing police brutality, an important pertinent issue in itself, as well as society disintegrating into madness. There is no Batman to save the city, only chaos.

It’s been done to death. Neon needs to wake up and realise they’re not in college in the late 90s/early 2000s anymore. They need to do better.

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 30th, 2020