Identity

Sawhney’s back catalogue is freighted with album titles such as Migration, Beyond Skin and Immigrants. Now comes Identity, and if the theme seems obsessive it would surely be fairer to call it vital – and in these times of culture wars and incarcerating immigrants on floating barges it arguably grows more vital by the day. It’s a theme that reflects the weighty engagement of Sawhney’s songwriting, his lived experience as a British-Asian and the multi-cultural fusion of Indian classical, hip-hop and everything in between that has been his forté since his 1993 solo debut Spirit Dance. The other side of Sawhney’s thematic coin is that there is more that unites than divides us – another of his albums was simply titled Human. He explores these issues with his usual acuity of vision on songs such as ‘Faceless Enemies (feat YVA)’, ‘This is Our Home (feat Ayanna Witter-Johnson)’, ‘Ancestral (feat Hak Baker)’ and ‘We’re not Alone (feat Joss Stone)’. As a composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist the only thing he doesn’t do, of course, is sing and a different guest vocalist graces each of these 17 tracks. Stand-out contributions come from Guy Garvey on the sitar-laden ‘Darling Boy’, Joss Stone on the gospel-tinged ‘We’re Not Alone’ and Natacha Atlas on ‘Be Who You Are’. On ‘Illegal’ he even gets Gary Lineker to voice the kind of humanitarian sentiments guaranteed to enrage right-wing loons.