Gauri Paighan – Teen Error (2025)
Originally hailing from a small town near Pavel, India, Gauri (pronounced “gory”) Paighan describes herself as an “independent gypsy musician.” She has just released her first EP, Teen Error, a strange, gusty collection of seven songs caught in a paradox of carefully arranged songs and raw, bleeding vocals.
Paighan, according to a 2023 interview in LaMusique, is influenced by Jerry Garcia and Roger Waters, a detail that helps make sense of her music. One thinks of the paradox of Garcia’s music sounding both lazy and urgent or the paradox of much of Waters’ material having a rock and roll core but with a peculiar sense of distance, as if the overdubs are layered with deliberate exposure. Their stock in trade is disconnect, and it’s this very thing, this disconnect, that Paighan seems to revel in. Throughout the album, her vocals, often featuring unison overdubs, relish singing off-key over pristine keyboard sounds or delicate guitar parts. It’s as though she stylises herself as a punk at the Clinique counter. One can’t really say if she is able to sing on-key, but there seems to be an intention behind the sloppiness.
Paighan produced most of this project herself, except for two songs. She collaborated with Alterno on the reggae-forward ‘Repeat It’ and with Atharva Acharya on ‘Rare Nerine’, the album’s closer, that may strive for orchestral poignancy or it may not. It’s hard to say. These two songs are Teen Error’s outlying tracks and feel as though they belong on the collaborators’ albums, not hers. The heart of Paighan’s aesthetic is in the remaining five songs, where she negotiates a kind of truce between clear pop-sounding keyboards, muddy guitars, isolated drums, and occasional lead guitar parts.
It’s difficult to track down info on who makes up the band. One has the impression that Paighan played most of the instruments herself, but we’re guessing. The guitar part on ‘Repeat It’ sounds like it comes from a different player, because the other guitar parts are all played with the same deliberate execution and simple beauty. Whoever plays on ‘Repeat It’ is a shredder. The keyboard parts bring a subtle colour to the songs, and the drums seem to find a pocket even though the songs often feel without weight or a centre of gravity (the too-short ‘November’ being the one exception to this). Or, more to the point, their centre of gravity is overwhelmed by Paighan’s voice.
As with much of our teenage years, Teen Error is a swirl of good and bad, the sublime and the cringeworthy, the effortless and the forced. The album’s production seems intentional, but it’s still hard to know how intentional. Does Teen Error reflect the teen years, or is it drowning in them? Only time and another project will tell.
Find out more about Gauri Paighan on her Instagram and Spotify.
