From Hot Bollywood Action to

Lo-Fi Turned Into Hi-Tech

CD review roundup, 12/30/98

KALYANJI, ANANDJI

Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars, & Sitars

(Motel) ****

I LOVE movie music from Bollywood (the Bombay commercial film industry)! This is as great an introductory sampler of it as you’ll find. The Motel Records gang’s taken 15 tracks from ’70s crime and gangster films scored by the brothers Kalyanji and Anandji Shah, and heavily remixed and remastered them for western rock-oriented tastes. (Unfortunately, Motel’s added jokey song titles to most tracks (“The Good, the Bad, and the Chutney”) and left off any specific info about the original films they’re from.) Syrupy strings, twangy sitars, sireny synths, smoky harmonicas, metallic guitars, blazing horns, mod tambourines, and a hundred eastern and western musical traditions both smoothly mesh and jarringly confront to create what the liner notes rightly call “some of the wildest, funkiest, and least incidental `incidental’ music ever made.” To attempt to describe this any further would be foll. Just get it and be astounded.

If you’re after a purer packaging of the original music, without the gag song titles, check out the import 2-CD set The Golden Collection.

TIFFANY ANDERS

Runnin From No Place to Nowhere

(Up) **

Anders (sometime Dinosaur Jr./Mike Johnson backup singer, ex-Hot White Noon frontwoman, and daughter of filmmaker Alison Anders) has assembled twenty-five minutes of light, bright, sarcastic, sardonic, almost quaint singer-songwritery balladeering, backed by her own energetic indie-rock electric guitar (with assistance from bassist Jeff Tobin and three guest drummers, one of whom is Dino-boss J. Mascis in case you care). It takes about six listenings to really get into, but once that point’s reached Anders’s sweet-yet-strong voice and harsh-yet-melodic strumming can get to one.

PASTELS AND FRIENDS

Illuminati: Pastels Music Remixed

(Up) ***

How to make an electronic “remix” CD from one of the most enduring lo-fi indie rock outfits anywhere (Scotland’s long-running Pastels): Hire great synth composers and arrangers to create what are essentially new works, taking the titles, inspiration, and sampled bits of instruments and voices from old Pastels tracks (predominantly from the 1997 CD Illumination). The result: Not a cute-jangly-guitar album with electronics underneath, but a predominantly electronic album perfectly adhering to the Pastels’ aesthetic of patience, understatement, and wistful observance of life. Utterly perfect winter-drizzle music.

ROKY ERICKSON

Never Say Goodbye

(Emporer Jones) ***

When these home-tapes were made (mostly in 1971 and ’74), the Peanuts comic strip had already speculated about the Great Pumpkin, a dimigod-like gourd who searched the earth for the most sincere pumpkin patch. If ex-13th Floor Elevators frontman Erickson had been a gourd farmer, that mythical G.P. wouldn’t have had to look further. This solo-acoustic compilation’s the absolute most earnest, heartfelt set you’ll ever hear. No hypocrisy, no affectations (well, maybe a couple of fake-Dylan nasal wails but even those come off as charming), all serious and all rooted in Erickson’s rock-solid lyric writing and the real pain of his life. Indeed, six of the 14 tracks were made while Erickson was living in a psychiatric hospital (some associates claim he emerged more disjointed than when he went in). It’s perhaps not the best intro to psychedelic pioneer Erickson, but a great treat for completists, and for anyone who truly loves pure pop in the rough. (It’s also, the label claims, the first disc on which Erickson owns all the songwriting royalties. Currently living a semi-subsistence existence as a forgotten pop pioneer, he could use the bucks.)