The Gulabo Sitabo soundtrack is unlike anything you have heard in the Hindi movies this year. That’s not just because all its tracks are ...
The Gulabo Sitabo soundtrack is unlike anything you have heard in the Hindi movies this year.
That’s not just because all its tracks are original compositions, but also because it works as a standalone concept album, wherein a specific musical vocabulary and thematic concerns in the lyrics are to be found across all the songs. You can’t pluck any one track and put it in any stock situation.
The last Bollywood album of this sort was Kabir Singh, where each song not only communicated the overall emotion of crazy love but was also a sonic cousin of the other. But unlike that album, whose assembly-line conventionality was a drag, the 10 tracks in Shoojit Sircar’s Gulabo Sitabo are as un-Bollywood as they can get.
Composers Anuj Garg, Shantanu Moitra, and Abhishek Arora fuse Indian folk forms, predominantly baul, into bhajan and Rajasthani folk with rock and even country music thrown in. Since there’s so much folk here, the songs have an improvisational quality.
Holding them together are lyrics (Dinesh Pant, Vinod Dubey, Puneet Sharma), whose focus is describing the world as one giant illusion, where fortunes change without rhyme or reason, and all you can do is tolerate the whims of destiny.
For instance, when Vinod Dubey writes,...
