Music to give you migraines

There are two kinds of Pritam soundtracks, the weak kind and the kind you really enjoy and are then invariably told that the best track of the bunch has been borrowed from somewhere else. This soundtrack, for Rumi Jaffery's Life Partner, is the former: so weak you almost wish he'd have copied something instead.

Some songs, in their eagerness to find a catchy, unlikely hook, really overshoot the point. The way Kuke Kuke starts, the first two words sung in catterwauling cacophony, there's really no coming back. The annoyance delivered on start-up needs a truly special song to balance it out, and Pritam doesn't even try as he serves up random dhinchak loops that culminate to truly irritating effect. Worst start to an album all year, this.

Next up is Teri Meri Yeh Zindagi, and the heavy use of electronica (and repetitive loops) make it amply clear that this album is going to be pretty much mindless, at least for the most part. High energy bouncy vocals don't really help, and the song is too generic to remember even a minute after listening to it.

Aage Aage is another amazingly generic track, one which could be right out of a 90s Dancefloor Hits CD. The refrain sounds better than the chorus -- but this could be only because the heavily contrived beats take a bit of a backseat and one could be reacting with sheer relief. Not that it lasts long.

Goonji Aangan Mein Shehnai works a little better because Sunidhi Chauhan manages to ground the track and actually make it the only song in the album, but the tempo outside of her vocals is still too rapid -- and the India-India fusion thudding around the place is plain tinny.

Some random banality that Bollywood passes for hip-hop starts off Poorza Poorza, and perhaps because the rest of the album is so damned exasperating, this song almost sounds worth a listen. Soon you're disabused of that notion, though.

As if the album -- which in itself sounds like a series of too-boring-to-remember remixes -- wasn't bad enough, we are given two remixes. The Tauba Tauba (Remix) has some dancefloor potential, it must be admitted for the first thirty seconds, and then comes the Poorza Poorza (Remix) that really doesn't help matters much.

This is an album impossible to play in its entirety unless you're severely masochistic or conducting research into quickly attained migraines. I'm betting Pritam has a folder of 'sucky experiments' on his computer's desktop, right next to the 'korean hits to rip-off' folder and Life Partner's got some of the wrong stuff.

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