Music: Chirantan Bhatt, Shahdaab Bhartiya, Eddie Avil - Adam Avil & Dipanjan Guha
Lyrics: Manoj Yadav, Kunwar Juneja, Sanjay Mishra, Niket Pandey & Eddie Avil
Music Label: T-Series
Expectations:
In one word - nothing. An increasing number of scores in the last few months are clearly spotlighting the growing apathy to music and lyrics in general in the movies and substance and melody in particular. With this album billing multiple music directors and lyricists, hopes do not exactly rise for the star USP of Hindi cinema - its music.
Music:
The only song with a modicum of appeal is Shahdaab Bharatiya's 'Tum Jo Mile Ishq Me' - a modestly-appealing melody with familiar words, though a listless singer Chandrayee Bhattacharya accompanies a passable Mohd. Irfan.
Most of the songs are tuned by Chirantan Bhatt, scion of an eminent filmmaker whose melodies was usually luminous (Baiju Bawra, Himalay Ki God Mein), who has still to compose a single memorable melody in his ten-film career. He makes an attempt to do Punjabi folk in 'Injar Pinjar' (Tinku Gill-Megha) in which Tinku is as raucous as any transient bhangra-pop crooner. Mid-way, the song makes you wish to reach for the Fast Forward, but you cannot!
In the typical guitar-based 'Aye Dil Bata', singer Arijit Singh gets into high-pitched mode in what is supposed to be a love ballad - something not done in Indian music wherein love and yelling are antonymous in meaning! The gasping intakes of breath that are made deliberately audible to (we presume) express passionate intensity seem okay for Western albums but are incongruous in an Indian film soundtrack. The interludes try to compensate for the intrinsic weakness of the track by using convoluted notes aided by heavy percussion. And the lyrics (by Manoj Yadav) go the whole Urdu phonetic hog and the song ends up as another exercise in cacophony.
Bhatt's songs, in their structure, grammar and execution, usually sound like alien tracks overdubbed with Hindi words but without the right Hindi-Urdu diction and syntax - a malaise that also hits the opening track, 'Lucky Tonight' (Ann Mitchai-Sanam Puri). All pretensions are at least dropped in 'Forever More' (Ann Mitchai solo) scored by Niket Pandey and Eddie Avil. The two remixes 'Lucky Tonight - Club Mix' and 'Injar Pinjar - Club Mix' only succeed in upping the cacophony quotient.
Overall:
Time was when small, non-star-cast films became huge box-office hits on the strength of their songs, irrespective of genre. And this time is not really over, with Aashiqui 2 this year being the latest example from dozens over decades. Why do not the producers of small films learn from these examples that music can be a film's superstar and turn their films' b-o and enduring prospects from awful to maybe even awesome?
Our Pick:
'Tum Jo Mile Ishq Mein'