Yatra: Nomadic Souls

I’d better come clean straightaway and say that I had trouble with this disc. Kailash Kher is a big star in India, having risen to fame for playback singing in hit movies such as Mangal Pandey and Andaaz. He also comes from a highly respected musical background, his father having been a well-known singer of folk songs. Given Kailash Kher’s undoubted talent and distinctive voice, I was left wondering why he and his band, Kailasa, bothered putting their collective names to such derivative and frankly rather dull music. In some ways this album epitomises a problem that lies at the heart of much of the contemporary Indian pop scene – how to create a distinctive and individual voice in a truly popular idiom, whilst avoiding its adopted clichés. For all the claims here to draw on folk and Sufi traditions, what comes across most strongly is the bland backing to many of the tracks, taken from a variety of Western pop tropes (as the cover puts it rather uninspiringly, from ‘a funk groove’ to a ‘reggae beat’). The result is a decidedly 1990s sound. Given the relatively recent emergence of an Indian pop scene divorced from the cinema, then perhaps it is only to be expected that musicians are still working their way towards a more interesting and distinctive style. However, for my money there is far more interesting stuff coming out of the movie industry, and indeed from musicians still working largely in popular local folk idioms.