Monologues

With Monologues, the Indian-born and Toronto-based duo of singer-composer Vandana Vishwas and her husband, the songwriter and musician Vishwas Thoke, have created their second album. They have produced, unfortunately, another of those saccharin-sweet albums wherein ghazal-inspired Bollywood meets 80s pop. Vandana Vishwas has a beautiful voice, though one misses the glissandi so prominent in North Indian classical and rquasi-classical music. The songs are supported by a lacklustre tabla and Western instruments, which all create a sweet sound carpet. An exception to all this is ‘Des rSe Door’ (Away from the Motherland), where the lyrics (sung in Hindi) express the singer’s journey from the annual seasons in beautiful India to an extremely cold country (Canada). Here ‘Raga Todi’ (which usually expresses darker emotions) is combined with more cheerful ragas, expressing the seasons of the year.