Review: Serpents of Pakhangba – Air and Fire

Style: Avant-garde metal, folk metal, witchcore (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Sepultura, Ok Goodnight, Orphaned Land
Country: India
Release date: 12 Feb 2025

The annals of progressive metal history are littered with concept albums that stumble and falter under the weight of ideas too heavy for the composition, lyrics, production, or delivery to support. For every Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory or Operation: Mindcrime, there are dozens of lesser albums that tried to do too much. Concept albums can be something of an all-or-nothing affair; depending on how ambitious and pervasive the concept is, listeners may have a hard time appreciating the music without buying into the whole package.

So, how should modern metal bands thread this needle? Do too much, and listeners will bemoan the overwrought tackiness; do too little and they’ll be at your throat for not breaking the mold. What to do? Well, if you’re Mumbai-based Serpents of Pakhangba, you—deep breath in— release Air and Fire, an album telling the story of an endangered shamanic tribe under attack from a corrupt political group, divided into chapters and featuring spoken word; English, Japanese, Manipuri¹, and Goalparia² lyrics; throat singing; rapping; singing bowl; violin; and a host of guest musicians on various traditional instruments. What could go wrong?

Surprisingly, not much. Serpents of Pakhangba are a roaring engine with only a few cylinders misfiring. Air and Fire’s highs handily outpace its few lows, earning the band’s self-ascribed labels of avant-garde metal and shamanic music with aplomb.

A spiritual, shamanic concept is baked into Serpents of Pakhangba’s entire ethos as a band; they begin each of their albums with an invocation of Pakhangba, a traditional Manipuri deity often represented in the form of a dragon. The band’s promotional materials make it clear that they consider this ritualistic, ancestrally-attuned premise equally as important as the heavy elements in their music. 

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Serpents of Pakhangba wait until Air and Fire’s fourth track, “Carnivorous”, to remind us that this is also a metal album. Here, the frenzied, almost jarringly heavy introduction calls to mind some of Ok Goodnight’s heavier moments, until, out of nowhere, there is a rap interlude. The track rights course soon after, including seething guest growls by Mallika Sundaramurthy (Emasculator).

The musicianship of the many contributors on Air and Fire shows very few cracks. At the forefront, Hinoki on lead vocals delivers a smouldering performance. She traverses a husky mid-range, almost Gollum-like rasps (“North of Koubru”), and sedulously enunciated spoken word with ease, though her voice does thin slightly in the upper register. The one counterpoint to this fully committed delivery is that it can read a bit parodic—there are times when the spoken word reminds me of Calypso, the voodoo practitioner/goddess from Pirates of the Caribbean. Also on vocals, Akash’s Mongolian throat singing is foundational to the band’s tribal folk metal sound, at times crossing over into guttural almost-growls (“Fury”).

Air and Fire also features a long list of instruments, some familiar to Western metal listeners and others less so. Whether it’s a brief but incisive bass solo (“Carnivorous”), the mono-stringed Manipuri pena featured on several tracks, or the violin going off on wild tears—at its best (“A Wounded Leader’s Last Stand”) somewhat reminiscent of the cello in Leprous when it goes really nuts—each instrument is showcased with reverence. No single track shows off this diversity better than eight-minute “North of Koubru”, a highlight of the album. The pena at the 46-second mark soars, primal and plaintive, and the vocals that join in soon after in traditional Manipuri are timeless and haunting. The guitars and drums blast unforgivingly under it all, before relenting to a single pulsing drumbeat. Onto this, the band carefully stacks back each element—singing bowl, throat singing, guitars, pena, synths—until the towering wall of sound is rebuilt.

Outside of traditional instrumentations, the album also employs atmospherics to vivid effect: chirping birds and a fly buzzing in “Ancient Forest”, or the flowing water in “The Soul of the Word”, which weaves a sparse yet evocative background for the chanting vocals alongside monotonic strings and ringing bells,. Even listening to the album while buried under a metre of snow somewhere in the unending Canadian winter, I can almost breathe in the thick, rain-soaked air of the forest and its sacred trees in monsoon season.

While little fault can be taken with the performances on the album, some creative choices, such as the rapping, fall flat. Just because you can have a nu-metal moment, doesn’t mean you should. Additionally, Air and Fire’s pacing is a little off from a narrative perspective. Of the four spoken-word interludes on the album, three come in the album’s first five tracks, but then they disappear until a final brief interlude in “Air and Fire (Part I)” (which, also, does not have a part two). With most listeners relying on the English lyrics to situate themselves in the narrative, there is no true resolution to the story. The penultimate track “A Wounded Leader’s Last Stand” tees us up for a denouement that never comes, as the album closer “Soraren Chant” offers only a few non-English lyrics before ending in a fade-out (booo), leaving the listener to guess at the tale’s ending.

Does Air and Fire occasionally miss the mark? Certainly, but if the band was doing anything less, they wouldn’t be Serpents of Pakhangba. Their reverential fusion of shamanic spirituality and roiling heavy ingredients is one-of-a-kind; you should sort of know what you’re getting into when the t-shirts for sale on a band’s website come with incense included. With a fine-tuned distillation of the creative highs displayed on Air and Fire, in combination with the already formidable musicianship on display, I could see the next album from Serpents of Pakhangba being truly monumental.

Recommended tracks: Invocation of Pakhangba, Fury, North of Koubru
You may also like: Dub War, Amogh Symphony, Kartikeya, Grorr

Final verdict: 6.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Serpents of Pakhangba is:
– Hinoki: Vocals
– Akash: Vocals, singing bowl, synth, samples/turntable
– Varun: Drums, percussion
– Tamara: Violin, vocals
– Mousumi: Bass
– Vishal: Guitar, dotara, vocals, synth, symphonic orchestral arrangement

1. A Tibeto-Burman language spoken in India’s northeastern Manipur region. ↩︎
2. A dialect comprising multiple Indo-Aryan languages, spoken in Assam, also in northeastern India. ↩︎