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RDB

Confirmed news of the Rang De Basanti music release came in at 1:30 PM, from Vasu, who informed me that Sudhir had bought the CD on the way to the office, in the morning.

On the way to Planet M, I told myself that there was a fair chance this might be the CD that breaks the 200 Rs price barrier, and I talked myself into agreeing that I would NOT buy it if it were so. Well, it wasn’t. 160 Rs, 10 songs. What makes me crack up is that I also saw the CD of Rajkumar Santoshi’s Family, on sale for the same price, along with a couple of songs from Khakee included. Would really like to know how well sales of that soundtrack fares…

First Impressions:

Current count: two listens. And counting.

Begins with a one-and-a-half-minute Punjabi track ‘Ik Onkar’ which is all vocals ( songer: Harshdeep Kaur). Neat mutitracking. The title track, by Daler Mehndi and Chitra comes next – though pretty catchy, I thought it a trifle too long. The banjo beginning was not a banjo after all – sounds like a very familiar (Korg?) sample. ‘Paathshaala’, both the normal and the remix version ( which guest-stars Blaaze) is the kind of dance song that you really cannot dance to. I sincerely hope Blaaze’s version stays on the album and does not appear in the film. Boys was the pinnacle of his career – let’s leave it at that. ‘Khalbali’ was the most interesting song – faux Middle-eastern percussion, faux Middle-eastern lilt to the singing, authentic Arabic lyrics/vocals by Rai singer Cheb Nacim ( Or is it some other Nacim? No idea, really), Rahman’s grating accent when he sings it being the only minus to the song. I shan’t let my occasional hatred for Madhushree’s voice taint my judgement of the song ‘Tu Bin Bataaye’, but it sounds run-of-the-mill, really. ( Which means I will consider this the favourite song of the album after about two weeks.) Naresh Iyer’s voice sounds fabulous on this song, though.

One good thing about the album is that it gets better, or seems to, at least, with every song. ‘Khoon Chalaa’ by Mohit Chauhan ( of Silk Route) is a soft ballad that would sound like a Silk Route number if you replace the violin with the recorder. Minimal percussion, orchestral strings, well-written lyrics. Two very acoustic guitar-driven songs round off the album – ‘Luka Chhupi’ by Lata Mangeshkar and ARR, which is decent. Would have been catchier with a different female voice, but I feel that about every Lata song nowadays, so nevermind. ‘Roobaru’ is radio-friendly 90’s alt rock. The much-hyped Aamir Khan number, called ‘Lalkaar’, is more of a poetry recital, sounds like ‘Unnodu Naan’ from Iruvar than anything else, the words being nearly the same as “Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna” from the Legend of Bhagat Singh.

How’s Rang De Basanti going to fare as far as the charts go? Not too much, I guess. Aashiq Banaaya Aapne will win the Filmfare Award for best music, probably best singer too, beating Salaam Namaste in a close race. Do I look like I fucking care?

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Three favourite soundtrack composers

I am a big fan of soundtracks. Not just Indian soundtracks, all kinds. I am just awed by the fact that music can be used, in the hands of a skilled composer, to augment the impact of a scene in a film. I love the way music can be used as subtext in a barebones storyline. In fact, half the reason I end up hating a movie is when the accompanying soundtrack is crock. ( Perfect examples: the recent assembly-line productions of Ram Gopal Verma’s The Factory, which rely on over-the-top moodscapes to ruin half-baked storylines) Right now, there are three composers who are my personal Gods, people whose music make my day ( or night) anytime I listen to them.

On top is AR Rahman. Part of the reason why I like him, truth be told, is that I’ve grown up with his music. He was the nineties, for me, every year indelibly marked in my memory by a couple of Rahman albums. There really have not been too many Rahman soundtracks I cannot listen to at any given point of time, and there are few Rahman tunes I cannot recognise in the first seven seconds of the song playing within earshot. But yeah, his background scores are no great shakes – they are essentially reworked versions of his songs in that particular movie, played on a different instrument or in a different style, or a slower/faster tempo than the song itself. Very few Rahman-scored films of recent times had memorable scores, to be honest – the songs might be awesome, but that’s all you remember after you finish the film, the songs, and not the music. And I don’t think I was hallucinating when I heard the same snatch of music at the end of Swades and at a point in Mangal Pandey: The Rising. Of course I am a Rahman fan, you idjit, but faith that refuses to face the facts is not faith at all, as Albert Schweitzer once said and all that.

Second in the list, not because of quality – let me assure you that I am not comparing any of these three composers in any way, other than the fact that they make my earth move – is Ennio Morricone. I have been introduced really late to his music. Believe me, chances are – you haven’t heard Ennio Morricone’s music yet, true Morricone music, that is. Because, in the sixties and the seventies, when Morricone was composing kick-ass stuff, certain unscrupulous hacks in America, like Henry Mancini or Mantovani (that’s right, I know I should not call them such derisive terms, but it’s just their covers stunted my musical education. They have also done some good stuff in their days) did some lame-ass cover versions of his soundtracks, and just to show that people have lousy musical taste, these cover versions sold really well, and I suspect made their way up the Billboard Charts too. The cover versions didn’t sound bad, just watered-down. Insipid music that did not have a tenth of the energy that the original Morricone versions did. What was so unique about Ennio Morricone’s original compositions? I could rave about his quirky use of instruments, or the completely loony themes he came up with. A solitary twanging guitar, a wailing harmonica, the sound of a jew’s harp, shrieking human voices – Morricone did not need the grandeur of a string orchestra to come up with the soundscapes needed for a brutal desert shoot-out or a blood-splattered night. Or for that matter, a tenderly-shot love scene.It’s not like he never used string orchestras either,;he did, and very beautifully too, in later day classics ( Wolf, Once Upon a Time In America, Cinema Paradiso). This man made the most memorable oboe piece in cinematic history – ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’, from The Mission. He’s composed nearly six hundred soundtracks so far, and has managed to repeat himself in only two of them. Pure genius, I say.

Of late, I have stumbled upon ( not by chance, to be honest) Morricone’s scores for Italian Giallo movies – Dario Argento’s Cat O’Nine Tails, for example, and Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik. Awesome, goosepimply scores. I have much to thank Kill Bill for, and rediscovering Ennio Morricone is one of the reasons.

Third in the list is a lady whose music I heard people raving about so freaking much that I nearly went berserk trying to get hold of her stuff. Yoko Kanno is her name, and she’s a Japanese composer who has done music for anime titles like Cowboy Bebop, Macross Plus, Earth Girl Arjuna, and Ghost in the Shell; Standalone Complex. There’s one thing I need to make clear about Ms Kanno – you can never, EVER slot her into a genre, or even in two, or ten, or fifty seven. Absolutely no-no-No. Fine, so you listen to ‘Tank’, the theme music for Cowboy Bebop, and go “Ah, a Jazz-oriented composer, reminds me of brass bands of the forties.”, and then you hear ‘Live in Baghdad’ off the same album, a song that can give Judas Priest a complex, it sounds so eighties hair metal.Right, so the next song happens to be ‘Fantasie Sign’, a song that begins like an Edith Piafish French ballad, leading to a 180 bpm Jungle beat that kicks your teeth out of shape if you have your speakers loud enough. Of course, there is ‘Bindy’, a faux-middle-eastern piece where an alto saxophone tries to sound really hard like a shehnai, and very nearly succeeds; followed by ‘Forever Broke’, which is a slide-guitar piece you might hear Johnny Winter playing on a really, really bluesy day.

Right. So maybe I went overboard trying to describe how hard Yoko Kanno’s music cannnot really be described to anyone, you have to listen to it to figure out how much it rocks. And this is just one album, from out of a possible 7 albums accompanying Cowboy Bebop, with all its music as diverse as the genres from which this anime borrows its themes from. And then you have to listen to the rest of her work, each more audacious than the other. “Audacious without being pretentious” is the term I’ve heard someone use with regards to Yoko Kanno’s body of work, and it strikes me as the perfect term to describe her.

To buy or not to buy?

I am seriously waiting for the music of Rang De Basanti to be released. Music by AR Rahman, of course. It’s due sometime this week, and I really need to hear something more than the single line ( and that infectious banjo loop that plays along with it) on TV. The music of Water ( also by Rahman, and one that he called “the best work he has done so far” in an interview sometime back) has released on all the online radio stations, but I am not listening to it until the CD comes out.

Also tempted to buy Bluffmaster, even though I already have Trickbaby’s album. Two Ranjit Barot albums have also come out – Pooja Bhatt’s Holiday, the songs sound pretty decent, and another one called Brides Wanted that I saw last night in Planet M. But the 145-150 Rs tag on each of these CDs puts me off, I don’t want to buy Hindi movie soundtracks just for a good track or two, and then two months later, find prices slashed to half.

Heard Susheela Raman’s Music For Crocodiles playing at Habitat, and nearly ended up buying it. Saw the 445 Rs price tag and took the easy way out – ran home and listened to Love Trap(her previous album) for three days. That lady has a sexy voice, and she does some awesome music.

Also saw Trilok Gurtu’s latest album Broken Rhythms, it has Huun Huur Tu and Gary Moore guest-starring on some tracks. Temptations, temptations….

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Further Wish-list Fulfilment

You get all kinds of DVDs at National Market. Especially blockbusters, the kind of big-budget movies that go on to make a lot of money and win awards and all that. All three of the Lord Of The Rings movies have been available at National Market, and in different formats too. You can get the fullscreen versions, the widescreen versions, all three movies in one disc, all three movies PLUS Spiderman 1 and 2 on the same disc, or if you are really feeling adventurous, all three LotR movies and the three Harry Potter movies in the same disc.

Me? I was feeling a bit more adventurous.

And a good thing I was, too.

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Couple of random addressings

Woo hoo, I bought 13 volumes of Blade of the Immortal off eBay for less than half the price. The total came to 99.88$, including shipping. Which makes me extremely happy, because Hiroaki Samura’s manga was one of the items on my wishlist – the pencilwork alone elevates it to Godlike status. Dear Hallowed People at Landmark, you can now come kiss my ass.

An article on the Finnish band Varttina, about whom I posted quite a few weeks ago:

“We were scouring the world looking for just the right sound, and then one day we came across the album Ilmatar by Värttinä,” reminisced Nightingale at last week’s press conference in Toronto. “One listen to track six, a brilliant dark, piece, and we knew we had our sound.” ( for the Lord of the Rings musical)

I empathise, Mr. Nightingale, I really do.

* * *

Parents arrived last night. Spent quite sometime the last couple of days cleaning up the room; gave up trying to hide the DVDs at oddball places. And I hadn’t got me a haircut too, bah!

But what the hey, they were quite accomodating about the Far Side collection, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Special collection, and the Mecha-Hulk statuette, and the Ultimate Matrix set, and the rest of the darn DVDs and books and comics and CDs. “At least we know where your money went.” Ma got me the Bolton sketch (which looks awesome!) and the Englehart postcard, both of which had been delivered to my Guwahati address. They liked the house a lot, especially the fact that we have kept it quite clean and human-habitable. Now isn’t that surprising?

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Four albums that rock my world right now

Rob Dougan – Furious Angels
If you’ve ever heard the Matrix OST, tell me if you remember this track called Clubbed To Death. It starts off with gentle strings borrowed from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and then metamorphoses into a catchy orchestral beat-fest – with a piano solo interlude worth dying for. The gentleman who composed this piece was Rob D, D for Dougan – and Furious Angels is the album on which this song appears, along with a number of other vocal and instrumental pieces. Dougan’s growling, raspy vocals, chunky beats, the swirling orchestral sounds create an ambience hard to describe – it’s completely electronica one moment, making you bop your head to the rhythm, and then forces you to stop doing whatever it is you were doing and listen to a calm solo the next instant. Rousing stuff.

Mùm – Finally We Are No One

I learnt of this Icelandic band when I was out searching for resources about my favourite Icelandic artiste. A search for articles on Salon.com brought up an interesting piece about this band, and a free mp3. Got myself an album soon after, and boy oh boy, was it good or what. Two guys, two girls – the boys with interesting hardware and a weird aural signature, and the girls with cherubic voices, Mùm makes music that gives me goosepimples. “Liquid electronica” is a phrase I’ve heard somewhere about their music, and it’s so bloody appropriate. Bursts of static, crackling loops that sound like they have been sampled from ancient vinyl albums, dreamy tunes, and the voices, my man, the voices. And it’s not like you can listen to one song in a loop – it has to be the album, from beginning to end, that has to be heard again. And again.

This is where you can download some tracks ( I really haven’t checked if they are samples or full tracks) by Mùm.

Architecture In Helsinki – Fingers Crossed

I honestly do not know how I got this album. One fine day, I notice this folder on my harddisk and enqueue the songs on Winamp, and wham! I am hooked. I asked my Finnish friend at the office about the band – obviously, any band with “Helsinki” in it has to be from Finland – and he said ( after a bit of googling) that it was an Australian band. Weird. But yeah, he was hooked too. Fingers Crossed is one album that defies description of any sort; other than the word “joyous”, I can’t think of anything at all to say what the music makes me feel. Maybe the last album that gave me this euphoric feeling was Cake’s Motorcade of Generosity, with its catchy guitars and brass sections. Yes, brass section – AiH is one of the bands that uses woodwinds to superb effect, along with the oddest instrumental accompaniments. I think I need to share one of the songs with you guys, because I am running out of words here. So here you go – you know what to do, right?

Rage Against The Machine – Renegades

I have been a fan of Rage Against The Machine ever since Neo put the phone down and flew out of the phonebooth, to the mind-smashing intro riffs of ‘Wake Up’. I bought the cassette of Renegades the day I saw it at the music store, though I was a penniless student then. It was their last studio album, because they broke up right after, with Zach de La Rocha going solo and the rest of the band teaming up with Chris Cornell to form Audioslave. What I didn’t know then was that the album featured covers of punk, hip-hop and rock songs. Four years later, I put on the album again, and discovered that I now knew the originals too, and the contrast is stunning. Songs by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the MC5, Afrika Bambaata, The Rolling Stones – some already angst-ridden in their original versions, others quiet and unassuming – they are all given a perspective that’s uniquely Rage Against The Machine. But some things remain unchanged – four years ago, I loved the quiet menace of the drumless, bassless Beautiful World most of all, and today, it still makes me smile.

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