Badmarsh & Shri's Sign

You'd think this record would be right up my alley. One, I have a weakness for East Indian men with lower-class English accents. Two, I'm a dancefloor junkie who'll shake my rump to just about any beat that comes my way. But after listening to Signs, the second album by Badmarsh and Shri, the former a badass Anglo-Indian DJ, the latter a Bombay-born percussionist trained in classical Indian music, I find myself feeling edgy, irritable and downright pissed off.

That's fine. You're supposed to feel stuff when you listen to music?and like some other activities it doesn't always have to be pleasant to be enjoyable. According to Badmarsh (Hindi for good-for-nothing), Signs is supposed to be about feeling, anyway. "Everything had to be emotive, whether it made you angry or it made you swoon? We wanted it to be about feeling rather than thinking?that was our vision." Well, he and Shri have fulfilled their vision, but perhaps not in the way they intended. Compared to other music of the same lineage, such as the mid-90s recordings of Talvin Singh or the Asian Dub Foundation, which merge classical Indian instrumentation with dark, hard-hitting electronic rhythms, Signs is much more commercially palatable. This is exactly what makes it such a weak record. Badmarsh & Shri have succeeded in producing the sonic equivalent of an emotionally simplistic Hallmark card, or a Hollywood blockbuster that is short on plot and general substance but long on irksome sentimentality (viz. Armageddon).

The record doesn't actually start out badly at all?the first and title track itself is a respectable cover of the dancehall classic by Tenor Saw. Commingling maudlin strings, a smart acoustic bassline and a really catchy mid-tempo breakbeat, UK Apache, an Anglo-Indian vocalist known for his raggamuffin style, does justice to the spiritual Jamaican lyrics. "When the sun shines today/I go on my knees and pray/I say Lord let me have joy/Never let me have no sorrow." But from there, Signs spirals slowly into a nondescript mush of purposefully "uplifting" music. A track like "Sadanaa," resplendent in its luxurious tempo and sexy, mantra-like vocal, could be the kind of epic song that brings tears to the eyes of the listener, if one wasn't feeling so hit over the head. The strings are so languid, the acoustic guitar arpeggios so overarchingly sentimental that it makes me feel more pukey than anything else.

"Appa" is the last track and I don't know what to say about it except that it sounds less like the euphoric conclusion to a musical journey than the soundtrack to a Bollywood version of Endless Love. Tracks like "Swarm" and "Bang," which constitute the harder, more dynamic elements of the record, are neither here nor there as they lack the rhythm and intensity of a real dancefloor kicker, yet are too obnoxious to just sit there and listen to. To be fair, Shri's mastery of the multitude of acoustic instruments played on this record is somewhat mindblowing. I just wish that he and Badmarsh had been more concerned with expressing themselves, rather than wasting their time frantically trying to make us feel something.