Raanjhnaa || Dhanush & Sonam || Anand L Rai

[A.ANAND]

Music review: Ranjhanaa

Composer: AR Rahman

Lyricist: Irshad Kamil

Rating: ****

The AR Rahman film albums, that truly excel are the ones where he gets an able collaborator in the director too.

His best albums almost always emerge out of films that deeply embrace their music, helmed by directors with a fine musical ear. In Raanjhanaa, director Anand L Rai, who demonstrated a surprising understanding of music in his debut Tanu Weds Manu, does exactly that, making the maestro plunge into the musical flavours of Benares. The title song, Raanjhanaa revels in its lucid antara-mukhda-antara defying structure riding on a captivating beats of the dhol, the fresh voices and unconventional singing by Shiraz Uppal and Jaswinder Singh. Rahman's use of Hindustani semi-classical music, fashioned around his own ingenuous musical methods, is at play throughout. Be it the sparkling sitar solo in the title song or the elegant strains of the saarangi in Banarasiya, which has a khanjani-dholak motif, and is sung by Shreya Ghoshal. A superb arpeggio juxtaposes with Sufi tune in the haunting Piya milenge, sung by Sukhwinder Singh and the KMMC Sufi ensemble.

The album's Banarasi colours are further enhanced by Ay Sakhi that has the delightfully playful singing by Madhusree, Chinmayi, Vaishali and Aanchal Sethi.

A part of the film has an urban setting, and the maestro hits it out of the park here with Tu mun shudi, a Sufi-hippie hybrid that revolves around its Persian catchphrase sung by Rabbi Shergill and Rahman. The composer masterfully blends qawwali and bhajan through the charmingly lovelorn, Tum tak. There are two vastly different numbers, Nazar laaye and Aise na dekho, that sound like they could've been in another film. The latter is a beautiful ballad by Rahman.

Irshad Kamil's lyrics provide a perfect foil to the music. And this is Rahman's finest turn since Rockstar, seeing the maestro enter exciting new musical territories.

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/mu...hanaa/1126241/