Vintage Rahman with a dash of old-school charm
Music Director: AR Rahman
Label: Sony Music
Pakistani singer Shiraz Uppal and our own Jaswinder Singh create a crescendo of melody in the title track of Raanjhanaa. The song carries all classic Rahman elements – superb orchestration combining elements of the milieu and story in the soundtrack. The song brings you a whiff of Benaras and also the love story centred in and around the city. It marks a stupendous beginning to the album which grows and grows on you and never lets go. Banarasiya, which follows carries the flavour forward. Sung superbly by Shreya Ghoshal, Anwesha Datta Gupta and Meenal Jain, it carries the flavour forward. Especially pleasing to the ears are the tabla, flute and sitar interludes, so reminiscent of the classical tradition of Benaras.
The heavy duty sufi song, Piya milenge, inspired by Meerabai’s famous bhajan, Ghunghat ke pat khol take you to spiritual heights. Rahman has always done experimental stuff with sufi compositions and here too the use of KMMC Sufi Ensemble along with ever reliable Sukhwinder Singh makes it a layer cake of a song, with the chorus mixing effortlessly with the instrumentation and Sukhi’s vibrant voice.
Ay sakhi, sung by Madhushree, Chinmayi, Vaishali and Aanchal Sethi is almost an A cappella composition, what with the singers bringing to life the instruments too with their voices. The lyrics mimic Amir Khusro’s writings. It’s a fun song which takes the classical motifs of traditional Hindi poetry and weaves a modern fantasy about love and longing. Kudos to lyricist Irshad Kamil and to his vast knowledge of poetry for making the song possible.
Rashid Ali, Neeti Mohan, Nakash Aziz combine to make Nazar laaye, which reminds you of early Rahman, extremely hummable. The master rides the mike, along with Rabbi Shergill, for Tu mun shudi, probably the most experimental of the lot. It combines elements of various genres to bring you a bouquet of sounds which makes you scratch your head at first hearing but grows on you upon repeated listening. This and the Blues-inspired Aise na dekho (sung by Rahman and Karthik), which is the composer’s attempt to create a proper Blues song for Hindi audience, will mostly only appeal to the diehard fans of the maestro.
He returns to playing the mass favourite in Tum tak. This is vintage Rahman, reminding you of his ability of coming up with a catchy hook line and running away with it, evolving it into an amalgamation of ear-pleasing sounds in the process. Javed Ali, Pooja Vaidyanath and Keerthi Sagathia combine to make this one a winner as well.
The album also pays homage to the local deity of Benares, in the ever so short instrumental, The land of Shiva, which reminds you of vigorous temple chants in its brief existence.
Overall, this Irshad Kamil-AR Rahman compilation works on most counts and one hopes this acclaimed partnership will be more fruitful in future. That said, this is more of an old school album, reminiscent of film music of another era, so the youth might feel disconnected. But Rahman has magically won over followers for most of his esoteric efforts, so there is hope.