Tag: Yaadon Ke Baaraat

what January 2020 sounded like

 

Despite the portentous title, this is a round up of things I was sent by nice PR people that sounded interesting, since I said at some point a while ago that I’d do this regularly (and why not?) so here they are, in alphabetical order, because that’s simplest.

Artist: Collectress
Title: Different Geographies
Label: Peeler Records
Release Date: 6 March

I mentioned it here, but have to say more about it now that I know it a little better. If their previous album Mondegreen sounded like music from a benignly haunted doll’s house, Different Geographies has the same gently spooky charm, but takes (even by their standards) strange departures,  like on Mauswork, where their oddly Victorian string arrangements blend with electronic elements, or the beautifully wistful single In The Streets, In The Fields, a truly timeless melange of strings and modern sounding percussive elements and howling noises; which sounds much prettier than that description would suggest. Even within the album – and its individual pieces – it’s unpredictable and hard to define, with songs like the busy Landscape taking unexpected twists and turns during its five and a half minutes.
As with all of Collectress’s work, the music on Different Geographies is strongly visual and does strange things to time; a magical, otherworldly record full of delicate moods and strange musical non-sequiturs.

Artist: Little Albert
Title: Swamp King
Label: Aural Music
Release Date: 27 March

I’m always a bit dubious of the blues as a style, rather than as the product of a specific, African-American culture from a specific time period, but since it definitely is one (and really, if one can accept Eric Clapton as a blues musician then anything goes), I can say that this is a very cool sounding record, notwithstanding that it was made by a young white Italian guy (Alberto Piccolo) best known for his work in doom metal band Messa. Doom is of course the closest metal comes to the blues, and there’s a monolithic, Black Sabbath quality to some of the songs here, notably the cover of Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs. In fact, it’s a pretty good album if you like gritty, bass heavy blues of the late-60s type; it sounds great, and the most worrisome factor, Alberto’s vocals, are actually really good; his voice isn’t as powerful as his guitar playing, but emerging from the darkness with a hint of reverb it’s more than acceptable. With all the caveats that come with a heavy blues album from 2020, Swamp King is kind of awesome.

Artist: Nuclear Winter
Title: Night Shift
Label: self-release
Release Date: 7th February

Very polished, melodic death metal (at times almost like death-power metal) from Zimbabwe, this is essentially not my cup of tea at all. I’m always curious to hear music from places not normally associated with that kind of music and sometimes (there’s a great Saigon Rock and Soul album that I think I’ve mentioned before, also that Mongol Metal split from 2015 and last year’s compilation Brutal Africa of death metal from Botswana) it really shows artists approaching familiar musical ideas from a really different perspective. Here it doesn’t; with no disrespect to Gary Stautmeister – who wrote, played and sang everything here aside from some guest vocals – this is an album of classy modern death metal which could have just as easily come from Sweden, France or wherever. The plus points are that he writes cool riffs (Blueshift) and solos, can do both raw and melodic vocals well, as well as writing proper songs. The minuses – well, none if you love this kind of music. I can absolutely imagine Nuclear Winter signed to a label like Relapse or Nuclear Blast; he’s very good at what he does and if you like those Scarve/Sybreed type of bands, give it a go.

Artist: Pia Fraus
Title: Empty Parks
Label: Seksound/Vinyl Junkie
Release Date: 20 January

Something like an Estonian Slowdive-meets-Drop Nineteens, Pia Fraus have been around for ages (22 years!) and this is their millionth (I think sixth) album. It has a great title and is incredibly nice. As shoegazey/dreampop type albums go it’s pretty upbeat, wistfully happy, rather than wistfully sad and mostly relatively up-tempo with at times (like Love Sports) a Stereolab kind of texture.
The female (Eve) and male (Rein) vocals go very nicely together (hence the Slowdive/Drop Nineteens comparisons, they are rarely – exception; Slow Boat Fades Out – quite as ethereal as My Bloody Valentine) and although it’s hard to choose highlights from an album where all eleven songs are quite similar, it stayed nice all the way through without getting boring* and never became twee, so that’s an achievement in itself. I don’t know enough of the band’s other work to say how good the album is by their standards, but if you like the atmosphere of those Sarah Records, Field Mice kind of bands, but not their ramshackle amateurishness, this is highly recommended.

*if you’re in the mood for pop-shoegaze. If you’re not I imagine it would be extraordinarily dull

Artist: Revenant Marquis
Title: Youth In Ribbons
Label: Inferna Profundus
Release Date: 20 January

British black metal of the ultra-mysterious one-nameless-entity type, I really liked the imagery and atmosphere surrounding the album before I even heard it and the music didn’t disappoint. It’s the (I think) fourth RM album, but I’ve only heard bits and pieces before so I guess I’ll have to get the others now. Murky, very rough (it sounds loud even when played quietly), atmospheric and extremely black, it reminds me of early Xasthur and the chaotic obscure nastiness of Manierisme, though it’s never quite that eccentric. The key to its non-crapiness is that, just about gleaming through the surface noise and thunderous rumbling are strange queasy melodies, often simple but very effective and, crucially for this kind of music, every aspect (music/lyrics – insofar as one can make them out/themes/imagery) works together to make something bigger than the sum of those parts. And though the album rarely really gets better than the superb opening duo of Menstruation (a kind of ceremonial intro) and Ephebiphobia (actual black metal), it maintains that quality throughout. Hating teenagers and school (specifically Tasker Milward School; a moody highlight is The Blood Of Lady Tasker) is, oddly, a theme that runs through the album, though I guess that’s no less than the title promises. Loved it.

Artist: Sunny Jain
Title: Wild Wild East
Label: Smithsonian Folkways
Release Date: 21 February

After a Zappa-ish opening fanfare, Indian-American percussionist Sunny Jain and his excellent band bring together a vibrant and sometimes slightly indigestible mix of Morricone-esque rock and jazz with south Asian elements. It’s very good; at times it reminded me a bit of one of the all-time great soundtracks, Rahul Dev Burman’s Yaadon Ki Baaraat, but also the superb Kaada/Patton album Bacteria Cult. At times the album takes on a droning quality which gives it a very positive, summery feel, but at times, most noticeably on Osian, that becomes a loud, busy, blaring quality and a few more of the beautiful, quiet moments would have made it an easier record to love. That said, I haven’t heard anything else quite like it and it’ll definitely be on my playlist for a while.

 

REAL-TIME REVIEWS: YAADON KE BAARAAT (1973)

Something of an experiment; reviewing an album while actually listening to it. As will be seen, the downside of this approach is that there isn’t much time for fact-checking and so forth and it leads to a lot of description rather than actual criticism, but I thought I’d leave it as it is to give the most immediate response to the record. In this case, a record I have heard lots of times before, which is helpful (and, if there were rules, cheating; but there aren’t). Anyway; the info:

Yaadon Ki Baaraat Original Soundtrack (Odeon Records, 1973)                                                               Composer/Musical Director: Rahul Dev Burman

Firstly; the sleeve for this record is a fantastic pop art design, presumably echoing the poster design. I haven’t checked to see what the story is about, but the cool guy with the guitar and the possibly less cool singer standing in front of a drum kit with ‘The Avengers’ written on it suggests a preoccupation with western pop/rock music, which is also evident on the soundtrack itself. Also worth mentioning is the lovely thick and heavy vinyl. But putting the record on now…

guitarman

This amazing soundtrack suggests that for Bollywood, or at least for Rahul Dev Burman, whatever the calendar may have said, the year was really 1966; that heady period of spaghetti westerns, garage rock, late surf, early psychedelia, James Bond and Adam West’s (and Nelson Riddle’s) Batman. All of that is telescoped into the eighteen thrillingly eccentric minutes of side one; it may be (in fact the pictures from the sleeve suggest) that this for-the-time retro sound has something to do with the film’s storyline.

Side One
lekar ham diwana dil
Beginning with a roared ‘Hey!‘ followed by thumping, echo-laden percussion, fuzz and wah-wah guitars and a main theme which could be described as ‘Surf Munsters Go James Bond’ with added spaghetti western trumpet, this first track really has everything. There’s even what sounds like go-go dancer girls (how can it sound like go-go dancers? It just does!) singing a ‘shake-shake’ refrain, before Kishore Kumar sings the actual song with some classic Bollywood strings coming in for good measure. The verse is then sung again in the amazing unearthly high tones of (‘brimful of’) Asha Bhosle. There’s a great swinging beat – which in fact remains much the same for the majority of the album, and an expressive guitar solo and wah wah organ(!) This track sets out the basic texture of the album; distorted, strummed acoustic guitars (I think) with heavy percussion, all swimming in swimming-pool reverb. Kumar and Bhosle sing together, Bhosle groans sexily, there’s a bit of heavy brass and beat break with added ‘shake shake’s, lots of drama and then the track ends with a reverberating wah-wah-ed chord. One of the grooviest pieces of music you will ever hear.label1

aap ke kamre men                                                                               The rest of side one is taken up by aap ke kamre men, a peculiar, live-sounding medley of song fragments linked with dialogue (with odd phrases in English) and lots of rapturous applause.
Beginning not with a ‘hey’ but with a guttural ‘HAA!!’ and some extremely piercing reverb/fuzz guitar and deep, churning percussion, the first part features an instrumental break strangely reminiscent of the Rawhide theme and then abruptly ends with an eruption of rapturous applause. There follows some dialogue (sounds like a compere of some sort), mostly in Hindi except that it begins ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ and ends ‘the song goes like this...’
The next segment of the (sort of) medley is one of the album’s best tunes and pops up again and again through the rest of the soundtrack. It’s the ‘Yaadon Ke Baaraat’ tune, which starts out as a haunting, atmospheric, (again) reverb-laden flickering guitar part and a singer (probably Kishore Kumar again) humming and then singing the tune. After a couple of minutes there’s a very odd interlude with strangely watery-sounding beat guitars and a guy singing ‘zoo zoo zoo zoo’ before dissolving into laughter and more applause. ‘Ladies and gentlemen…. ‘ some hindi dialogue and another great guitar intro and more humming with more rapturous applause. As the not-quite-medley continues, it wanders down some strange avenues, not least a strangely bare segment where a male voice, accompanied only by bass, percussion and a deep halo of echo sings a peculiarly wandering melody. Even the most haunting segments are brief though, brutally cut off by the applause-and-announcer and once by a brilliant reverb guitar break.

About half way through the track there seems to be some kind of audience participation section, where the crowd joins in on a section with a folky beat flavour. At eighteen minutes, the long medley isn’t really all that long; but it includes several resprises of the ‘Yaadon Ke Baaraat‘ theme, a minimalistic drum solo, lots of laughter, strummed acoustic guitars and more Asha Bhosle; it’s groovy.
Side Two
o meri sonilabel2
This moodily dramatic song is perhaps the most (to Western ears) typically ‘Bollywood’ track on the album and opens with soaring strings over richly textured acoustic strumming. Kishore Kumar’s impassioned vocal has a slightly sillly ‘I loooove yooou’ chorus, but the not-unlikeable cheesiness becomes something far more substatial (but still a bit cheesy) with a great bass/guitar/string break and ascending string. The melody wanders and Asha Bhosle joins in with her own piercing beautiful ‘I love you’s and another verse/chorus. The song ends as a duet, accompanied by organ and strings; it’s very cool and then fades out
yaadon ki baarat – This time Asha Bhosle sings the atmospheric tune acapella before the brilliantly shimmering guitar part is reprised. The mysterious atmosphere is enhanced by multitracked Asha Bhosles, strings and organ; and then it;s over all too soon.

chura liya hai tum ne – This is one of the most beautiful of Asha Bhosle’s performances on the album. The song has a slow beat and big jangling guitar part and even a hint of Spaghetti Westernish sounding trumpet. There’s also a lovely violin solo

yaadon ke baaraat – The theme tune appears one last time, now sung by three male voices. The tune is as lovely as always but lacks the Asha Bhosle magic. It’s very possible that (as with opera) I just prefer female Bollywood voices to male ones.

As will be obvious, I know very little about Bollywood musicals or their soundtracks. What I have learned from the five or six I own though, is that Rahul Dev Burman was some kind of musical genius and Asha Bhosle sings like an angel. Both of these factors are prominent on the Yaadon Ke Baaraat soundtrack, which is a masterpiece of slightly kitchy grooviness, brilliantly performed and recorded.

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