musafir: lounge away

The pasha of stylish distributed plagiarism, Sanjay Gupta, has unveiled the soundtrack of his next opus Musafir. On the film front, there's more cool makeup, and there's bound to be oodles of style. Hopefully, it proves as entertaining as Kaante and not a befuddled pile of week-old noodles like Plan. The soundtrack album touts itself as being India's first club lounge album. It's a 2 CD set, which mixes new work from Vishal-Shekhar in both regular (how can you tell, really?) and mixed form (courtesy Nikhil Chinappa I am told), and also bundles tracks from the Kaante soundtrack. Sunidhi Chauhan claims top honours with little effort (despite saying kaTin instead of kaThin in ishq kabhii kariyo naa, and Shreya Ghoshal comes across like a North-Indian version of Chitra with an oh-so-squeaky voice. The advantage of the layers of sampling and beat paste is that bad voices get superseded by infectious loops. Sanjay Dutt's singing attempts (note how he decides to go liberally tuneless on numerous occasions like mai.n boluu.N aaj tuu bole kal) on tez dhaar have some street-smart lines and a heavy ode to Mark Knopfler/Dire Straits, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ry Cooder and Carlos Santana as a saving grace. Sukhwinder Singh, Kunal Ganjawala, Kumar Sanu and K. K. do the needful on the other tracks. And Krishna's sufi-tinged rendition of rabbaa rocks. One of the CDs bears the tag "Club" and the other "Lounge". All this I am told. Wouldn't mind getting myself a copy. But if club/lounge ain't your thing, stay away. And a few extra points for strange mix names (Pyschedelic Insomnia, Kinky in Ibiza).

The film was slated to collide head-on with Yash Chopra's Veer-Zaara during Diwali, but the actual release date seems to fall somewhere in the late November fragment of the year.

One thing puzzles me. Sanjay Gupta had announced a special audio complement to the Kaante soundtrack -- with extra tracks composed by Viju Shah, Lucky Ali, Shiamak Davar, Adnan Sami, Sulaiman and Salim Merchant and A.R. Rahman. Although they abandoned that ambitious plan, I wonder if it was all hoopla... Is any of the stuff on Musafir a residue of rejected music on Kaante?