music review

Khakee: So this is the next Rajkumar Santoshi venture (already made famous for Aishwarya Rai's accident on the sets) featuring Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgan, Aishwarya Rai, Tusshar Kapoor, and Jaya Prada (ugh!). The ironies evident in the fact that the film is being produced by horror specialist Keshu Ramsay, of Ramsay Brothers fame are not lost on your humble blogger. The music director for the soundtrack, Ram Sampat is a veteran of over 5,000 ad films and also tuned Indipoppies like Shaan's Tanha Dil and Shiamak Davar's Mohabbat Kar Le. First up, vaadaa rahaa has Arnab Chakravorty (who he?) and Shreya Ghoshal, singing a Nadeem-Shravan-esque song filled with tired Sameer lyrics. Skip. Next up, electronica. Sunidhi Chauhan gives her best (but doesn't sound like she has been asked to do too much different, except for the rapid swings about the octave) to aisaa jaaduu. Lyrics? You must be joking, saar. yuu.N hii tum mujhase pyaar starts off in a Rahman vein, before the mukha.Daa. Nothing very exciting about the melody or the lyrics, and then there's Sonew Kneegum again, along with Shreya Ghoshal. The Ghoshal-Kneegumigraine continues with a silly tune dil Duubaa (which sounds like the kind of mess that plagiarist Shravan's offspring siblings ripoff-wannabes Sanjeev-Darshan would come up with). Then we have the sad[sic] version of vaadaa rahaa. What makes it truly truly sad is that Arnad and Shreya are eschewed for the migraine inducer from Haryana. Then we have our first inevitable remix. This is dil Duubaa, which retains Kneegum (albeit electronically desensitized) and Ghoshal, overlays it with egregious faux English raptastica (in a tune that's vaguely familiar ...) and North-Indian balle-beats; Richa Sharma and Kailash Kher (who will be singing for ARR in Mangal Pandey) sing the obligatory amentlay otay odgay. vaadaa rahaa returns with Udit Narayan replacing Arnad (clearly this is the irritating theme song in the film). A train sample opens uupar vaale, which, except for Kneegum, has the most verve in the whole album: be it the spirited vocals, the music mix (little samples of guitars with phasers and distortion, sarangi riffs), the electronically-altered vocal responses. Thankfully, Sukhwinder Singh does enough to elevate the song from the pit of damage that Kneegum sank it into. A Latin-flavoured spirited remix of aisaa jaaduu winds up the album. Looks like the verve got in late on this one.

In other happenings, Kneegum is all set to launch an English album in the US:"I may be a star in India and to Asians only (abroad), but I am very small fish in the American market. It may be a humble, small beginning for me, but I hope my fans keep their fingers crossed for me!". Guess this should be scarier than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.

amentlay otay odgay is PigLatin for "lament to God".