Mix and Match

The album opens with Aashiq surrender hua that reminds one of Chalao na naino se baan re from Bol Bachchan. Some squelches and dhol sounds open the song sung by Amaal Malik. Lyrics such as Tune English mein jab humko daanta toh aashiq surrender hua don’t do much service to anyone. Shreya Ghosal has been completely wasted as a singer in this extremely ordinary piece. Akhil Sachdeva just batters the vocals in Humsafar, which isn’t a bad composition. The song, overall, is so wobbly that one wonders if the person handling the autotuner knew how to handle the machine. The female voice is uncredited but sounds much better than Sachdeva, who has tried to sound like Atif Aslam, and fails miserably.

The trend of remixing a retro piece seems to have returned. Almost every other film is picking one song, getting some local poets who call themselves rappers to add their bit and expecting success. Ameen Sayani’s trademark line “Namaste behno aur bhaiyon” opens Anuradha Paudwal and Bappi Lahiri’s Tamma Tamma. Most of the original song has been retained. Baadshah raps midway through the track. It’s not bad, and is a desperate attempt at finding airtime and popularity.

The only song that makes us sit up a little is Arijit Singh’s Roke na ruke. Now, it isn’t a great piece of music, but amid the din that this album is, the sarangi prelude suddenly catches one’s attention. Singh sings this one well, like he does in most of his pieces. The ditty is a guitar-and-drums track that has the singer carry a regular composition very well, all expressions in place that come through.

The album needed something like a Main tenu samjhawan (Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania) to find some kind of resurrection in the current music scene. For now it remains a little below the middle rung tunes and is likely to vanish without much blip on the charts.