Metal bands don’t typically list the Police or Shakespeare among their influences, but Ra is a little different from the average metal band.
The quartet sounds different, for one thing. Instead of embracing the droning sludge-metal currently dominating the genre, Ra leavens its crunch-heavy tunes with powerful musical hooks on songs that evoke a slew of forebears, including Metallica, Queensryche, Soundgarden and, of course, the Police. Lead singer and guitarist Sahaj is something of a Police aficionado.
“My goal in life is, I would love to have a band that picked up where the Police left off,” he said.
No one is likely to confuse the new-wave trio’s tunes with Ra’s, but Sahaj sees a philosophical connection to Sting’s old band.
“If you listen to ‘Synchronicity’ and you listen to the direction that they were heading, by the time you reach ‘Synchronicity,’ there really aren’t any reggae songs; there really aren’t any things that are the typical, what you think of as the Police,” he said. “They were more just really interesting desert-like, very spectrumy, ethereal pop songs with some real depth. To be contemporary, I felt like we needed to include more of the harder rock stuff.”
Yet the harder rock stuff on Ra’s debut, last year’s “From One,” makes the band’s contemporaries mostly seem boring. While other groups are singing about their crummy lives, Sahaj is creating characters and singing about their lives in vivid detail.
“When I’m writing lyrics, I think in terms of scenes and acting and drama. Shakespeare was a big influence on me,” he said. “A lot of songs center around the singer and the singer’s life. I don’t consider myself a particularly interesting guy, so I didn’t think there was that much to write about, and for me, it’s more exciting to create people who don’t actually exist.”
