Category Archives: Music

Music

Compact Discs lol

I upgraded my phone recently, so the phone adapter to the music system in my car no longer works. I am too cheap to spend 30$ to buy a new adapter (and too broke to buy a new car), so there was no alternative but to make use of the 6-CD changer that lies unused all this time. Well, except on road trips, when I take some backup discs along in case my phone runs out of battery, not an overly infrequent occurrence with the older model. I don’t buy too many CDs nowadays. Who does, really? Spotify satisfies nearly every musical itch and then some. T-mobile, bless their soul, does not charge for streaming music, so it’s no longer necessary to keep everything cached offline, eating up precious phone drive-space. But the biggest problem I have with playing CDs is that scrobbling comes to a standstill. And believe me, I love my scrobbling.

Look ma, it's 2002!

Besides, who needs accessories like this?

So there are six CDs in my car now. And this is a post about what they are.

Disc 1: Sylvan Esso – their self-titled album.

t

I heard this band when they opened for the Tune-yards in May this year, at the Fonda theater. (That concert, FYI, resulted in me being hearing-impaired for the better part of two days, a scary but well-deserved situation because I braved a cold to go attend it. )

Everybody I talk to thinks Sylvan Esso is a person, but apparently the name comes from an Assassin’s Creed character. The band is vocalist Amelia Meath and producer/knob-twiddler Nick Sanborn, and the two came together from different ends of the musical spectrum. Meath was an indie folk artist who was part of a 3-member band called Mountain Man (who sound exactly like you think they would) and also part of Feist’s backing band during her Metals tour. Nick Sanborn was bassist for alt-rock band Megafaun and occasional DJ/producer operating under the name Made for Oak. What gets me about them, other than the lovely way the vocals, lyrics and the music mesh to create their unique sound, is the relentless energy both of them brought in their live performance. Hard to explain that about from a lady with a mic and a guy hunched behind a table full of audio gear, but that is why live shows kick ass. You see the way the two of them are into the music, and that elevates the songs from ear-friendly pop candy to something primal. To get an idea of what I mean, check out this live version of ‘Wolf’, one of my top three songs in the album.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSXPvY8og-g[/youtube]

I tend to enjoy this album at two levels. There are times when the energy of the songs carries me along on weekday mornings, bringing an extra bounce to my step as I park the car and walk into the office. Other times, I focus on the words – contemplative, thought-provoking and deep – and they bring me peace. Yes, it’s that kind of an album.

Between the time I first heard them and now, Sylvan Esso seems to have exploded into the mainstream scene, with lots of airplay, an appearance on Jimmy Fallon, and a bunch of sold-out headlining concerts around the country. They totally deserve it.

Disc 2: Oh Land – Wish Bone

oh_land_wish_bone

I have talked about Oh Land before, and when I heard tidings of her new album last year, it made me giddy with delight. After I heard the album, of course, I may or may not have had a seizure, from the different ways in which Ms Fabricious’ music hit my pleasure centers. The production on the album is top-notch, and every song is a gem. From the percussion-driven guitar and synth riffs of ‘Bird in an Aeroplane’ to the harp-and-choir-backed ‘3 Chances’ ; from the quirky near-dissonance of ‘Boxer’ to the joyous feel-good chorus of ‘Cherry on Top’; the foot-tapping ‘woo hoo’s in ‘Pyromaniac’ to Wish Bone covers a wide range of emotions, musically and lyrically. ( The most memorable lines, to me, appear in ‘3 Chances’ – “If kittens all got 9 lives/and zombies resurrected/could it be with you and me/the pattern’s neverending”).

Sure, I realize that my repeated playing of this CD brings even the tail-end tracks into my ambit. (the term ‘B-side’ should be officially retired from any music discussion, I find it somewhat demeaning. The unfortunate placement of a song in a sequential list should not lead to the implication that it is inferior to the first few members of that list) There is one called ‘Green Card’ towards the end of the album, co-written by Sia Furler, which could take on lead singles of other, lesser artistes head-on. Fitting that the album comes to end with ‘Love You Better’ and ‘First to Say Goodnight’, two of my favorite songs.

Disc 3: Suzanne Vega – Close-Up Vol 1: Love Songs

album0

I love Suzanne Vega. If you have a soul, you do too. She makes music that refuses to be associated with a genre or a moment in time, or be affected by musical trends and styles – much like herself. The Close-up series of albums is her attempt to rerecord her older songs in stripped-down versions, with minimal instruments and  studio theatrics. She also grouped them by theme, the other three volumes being ‘People and Places’, ‘Songs of Family’ and ‘State of Being’. I bought ‘Love Songs’ because hey – love songs! But really, it was because of ‘Caramel’. Listening to this version was as much a shock as hearing it for the first time – it’s just her voice and a single acoustic guitar, quite a difference from the bossa-nova trappings of the original. Time has passed since then, and right now, I feel like if the original version of ‘Caramel’ is a first-date song, seductive and thrilling, this interpretation is the song you would want to play when the two of you are watching the sun go down on a beach, twenty years later.

The songs in this album, sadly, have replaced the originals in my head. When I go back to Retrospective, the 2-CD set that pal Chandru gave me a long, long time ago, and which got me hooked to Ms Vega, I find the reverb and the beats somewhat over-bearing, the orchestral effects that drew me to the music seem really out of place. Close-up puts the focus squarely on her voice and the words, and it works so well. ‘Stocking’ gives me a boner every single time I hear it (and it makes me want to clap along when she says ‘Oh yeah’). I smile to the words of ‘If You Were In My Movie’, and I try very hard not drive off the road while bopping along to  ‘(I Will Never Be) Your Maggie May’. I have managed well so far, I guess.

(1000+ words, so the next three CDs will be in a future post. They are sort of connected, so it makes sense. Sorta.)

Standard
Music

Joy

My second Coachella trip involved a lot of new – and old music – being played on repeat for a few weeks, to get into the groove. Among the new music I liked, this song by Kill The Noise and Feed Me infected me with its smooth, slap-bass-happy head-bopping groove.

[youtube]5QTBrVPeJ1w[/youtube]

And yesterday I stumbled across this, which made me love the song even more.

[youtube]eaIvk1cSyG8[/youtube]

We live in a beautiful world. But you already know that.

(Possibly more on Coachella later)

Standard
AR Rahman, Music, Quizzing

The Rahman Quiz

While I acknowledge that I am a Lapsed Quizzer, there comes a time in a man’s life when he is forced to shake that queasy (yeah, fine, pun intended) feeling out of himself by going all Powerpointy. I have been listening to some Rahman every now and then. Though I tend to stay away from his earlier catalog as much as I can, ever since that year-long sabbatical from his music. A friend and I were talking about “Aha” moments in his songs – where random back-up singers go “aha”, like in ‘Kilimanjaro’ and the title track of Parthaley Paravasam. We tried to think of other songs of a similar nature, and suddenly I found odd bits of trivia popping up in my head. So here, out, damned spot. A bunch of 20 questions that are somewhat sensible, and sometimes not. Please make sure to read the fine print (second slide), and come back here for answers in a few days.

(For those who cannot see what’s below, it’s supposed to be an embedded Slideshare iFrame. Here’s a direct link to the page.

Standard
Music

Thoughts after listening to Lucky Ali one evening

Lucky Ali is one of the few singers from the Indipop explosion of the late nineties who was genuinely talented, equipped with a distinctive voice and musical sensibility. His songs were about life, nature, journeys, and occasionally love, all of them tinged with a sort of sunny melancholy. Optimism in the middle of sadness, hope mixed with longing. Sunoh, his first album came out in 1996. The first time I saw it, I mistook it for a Rahman song. Because of the way the song was arranged – the bouncy percussion track, the strumming guitars and the unconventional nasal voice. The video had a sepia tint to it, something very different from the usual garish Anaida and Daler Mehndi videos that came our way.

It was very hard to fall in love with the rest of album that easily. The proprietor of the local music shop asked me not to buy it, much like he asked me not to buy Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Sangam when it came out, because it did not appeal to him, because he did not “get” it. Sunoh was kind of weird. Only one song had a video, for the rest of them, you had to let the tracks and the instruments seep into you you, bit by bit. The title song ‘Sunoh’ was catchy to a point, as was ‘Pyaar Ka Musafir’, but it did not stray from its theme one bit. The songs were constructed without mainstream pandering, the compositions weren’t mollycoddling the listener. A few years later, Silk Route would do something similar with their debut album Boondein, albeit in a more audience-friendly manner. But that time and year, Sunoh was one of its kind, an extraordinary debut.

Sifar, released in 1998, was Ali beating the sophomore blues by outdoing himself. I still do not understand why ‘Teri Yaadein’, the first song on the album, or ‘Mausam’, the most accessible one were not pushed out to video, instead of ‘Dekha Hai Aise Bhi’. Trust me, I love that song, but I always thought Sifar never became as popular as his first album because the video did not have the all-ages Bollywood-story appeal that ‘O Sanam’ had. I began listening to the first two albums again yesterday, and there’s no doubt that the songs on them albums were truly unlike anything Indian popular music had to offer.

If you listen closely, there’s a definite sound that binds all the songs in Sifar, a choice of arrangements that thematically links all the songs together. Notably, the unconventional use of percussion, creative guitaring and multiple wind instruments that I cannot quite put my finger on – the sound reminds me of bagpipes mixed with the oboe. Consider ‘Dil Aise Na Samjhna’, for example. Nearly no percussion, and the carnatic violin appears along with the guitar as the primary instrument; even a cello, at times. The tabla peeks in for a few seconds around 2:30, and then disappears. ‘Mil Jaan Se Kabhi’ is like Mike Oldfield-lite, the arrangements hopping from a muted tubular-bellish sound to string pads to Chinese flutes, recorders and other assorted wind instruments. The acoustic guitar and mandolin layer the main chorus, quickly seguing into by an electric guitar flourish atop a drum-roll that in turns makes way for a short piano melody (Is that really a piano? There’s an actual sliding note there). It drives me nuts trying to break down the song like this, but all these disparate sounds somehow work together without drawing too much attention to themselves. And it ends with an anguished howl backed by synth strings. Fucking awesome. Every song in Sifar has a distinct personality, a riff or a line that you can take away with you with every listening. Not many albums do that.

However, one wonders if Lucky Ali is soleley responsible for his unique sound. Part of the credit should definitely go to arranger and co-composer, his brother-in-law Mike McCleary. McCleary is based out of Australia, and he’s credited as arranger and guitarist on Sunoh, and as part of ‘The Lucky Ali Team’ on Sifar, the second album, along with lyricist Syed Aslam. His name appears on credits of songs here and there – additional arrangements on ‘Himalaya’ from AR Rahman’s Connections, a beautiful piano-only mood piece, and as producer on Rahman’s charity single ‘Pray For Me Brother’. But it’s last year’s release, an album called Classic Bollywood – Shaken Not Stirred, produced by McCleary and featuring five alternative Indian female singers on vocals that brought him some kind of formal recognition. Primarily because of the track ‘Khoya Khoya Chand’ was used in spectacular fashion in Bijoy Nambiar’s 2011 film Shaitan.

Coming back to Lucky Ali’s output post-Sifar, his output seems to have been largely Bollywoodised pap. He has taken to singing for films nearly full-time, beginning with Kaho Na Pyaar Hai in 2001. He went on to appear as the lead in Pooja Bhatt’s Sur (and singing all the songs himself) and Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante. He sang for Rahman too, both in Tamil and Hindi. He has released pop albums (presumably with McCleary in tow) almost every other year, and while you can find ear-friendly ditties and eye-candy videos accompanying said ditties, his singing has been confined to the pattern that he established in his first two albums, echoey nasal crooning that is supposed to exude sincerity and heartbreak. Barring the occasional flash of musical chutzpah, it has been 15 years of predictability. Not really a bad thing, but still feels like he did not go further than Sifar in terms of challenging audiences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqqlw6YRhv8

The last time I really liked Lucky Ali, the time when he managed to surprise me was in the track ‘Tu Kaun Hai’ , used in the film Bhopal Express, starring Kay Kay Menon and Nethra Raghuraman. He sings the song very unlike his usual style, employing a lower pitch in the main verse. This coupled with the breathy sound that punctuates the song produces a somewhat unsettling – and striking – effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RMb_LlLnIU

Standard