DUBAI: Dubai-based five-piece The Deer Hum dropped their debut EP, “Take Time,” on July 23. The five-track record, lead singer and guitarist Andrei Ramos said, is “reflective of the expatriate experience in Dubai, to some degree. It’s basically snapshots of life in Dubai.”
It’s not just their songs that reflect life in the UAE city. The band’s makeup also echoes the cosmopolitan nature of Dubai. Ramos and his younger brother Alvin, who plays bass in the band, are from the Philippines, along with drummer Jerome Deligero, while rhythm guitarist and backing singer Yohaan Samuel hails from India and lead guitarist Manuel Obando is Colombian. All have been long-term residents in the UAE.
Samuel and Ramos write the majority of the band’s material, which sits somewhere between alternative pop-rock and alt-folk — melodic and catchy, but with lyrical depth.
Ramos suggested “mellow” is “not necessarily too far off” when describing the feel of the record. “I’d say it’s ‘alternative,’” he added. “I mean, ‘Like Flint’ is a very stomp-y, Mumford (& Sons) kind of song, but then you have a kind of Fleetwood Mac vibe from ‘Take Time.’”
“Mellow” is also a fair description of the band themselves. They don’t do much self-promotion, and while they’re well-respected within Dubai’s small independent scene, they’ve done little so far to get themselves noticed outside of it. It’s been five years since they formed, and they’ve only now released their first recording.
“We’re pretty low-key,” Ramos admitted. “Not much fanfare here. You could say we’re not the most ambitious, but we had the opportunity to put some music out, and we wanted to do it.” The lack of a lead single from the record, Ramos said with a laugh, is down to the fact that “we fell so far behind our original timeline that by this point we’re just, like, ‘Let’s just get it out there. Get it over with.’” The EP was recorded over three days at New York University in Abu Dhabi, and was engineered, mixed and mastered by Matteo Marciano there. “He’s a great guy,” Ramos said. “We really enjoyed working with him. It was a collaborative effort.”
Ramos explained that the band hope to make enough money from sales of the EP to get back into the studio again soon, with some newer material. “Some of these songs (on the EP) are very old, so getting into the studio and remembering where we were at when we wrote them… we had to dig for that a bit,” he said. “But it’s sweet to get it out of the way. It’s like a child, basically. You release a child into the world and you’re happy right? ‘I’ll love you for who you are.’”
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