Music of Hello

It’s evident that Sajid-Wajid’s effort was to create a “rocking” album. For the most part, “Hello” is too wrapped up in over-zealousness to come across as effective.

Why do all Salman Khan-on-stage tracks come across either as childish or an assault on your senses? Taking plenty of influence from Timbaland’s “Throw it on me”, “Bang Bang” has many ingredients, and a tad bit too much of them - to the point that when the song ends, one needs a sigh of relief to recuperate. As Salman would say, “just chill”.

The album gets progressively but faintly better. The “Hello” title track once again takes inspiration from a popular Latino hip/hop track – Culo by Pitbull. The song, featuring a bevy of vocalists including Suzy Q and the highly questionable Ishq Bector, is simple yet infectious, and arranged well – with the usage of rare devices like vocal beat-boxing. “Hello” seems like a better track to popularize the film on the airwaves, instead of “Bang Bang”.

“Karle Baby Dance Wance”, featuring Daler Mehndi, is a typical Punjabi club number, lyrically focused on the usage of typical Indian double-rhymes, like “dance-wance”, “puppy-shuppy”. Basically, nothing great-shate.

On “Mitwa Re”, we hear the “voice that smiles”, Shaan, along with Sadhana Sargam. A standard Bollywood ballad, which is very characteristic of Sajid-Wajid’s work, the song is a good composition, but lacks recall power because of its over simplicity.

Almost as if contrasting the over simplicity, you have the over-cooked “Rab Da Banda”. With an Arabic beat-pattern interspersed with electronica/techno, the song is rendered in a Kailash Kher-like fashion by Sonu Nigam, Zubeen Garg and Sunidhi Chauhan. Yes, I know – for a song with such a powerful cast to falter is unimaginable. Nothing’s impossible.

When you come around to listening to “Caravan”, it almost feels like Sajid looked at Wajid and said, “Enough! Enough of this childish ‘Bang Bang Hello Vello’ gibberish! Let’s make some serious music now.” “Caravan” is a diamond in the rough – a drifter/nomadic track, which is almost like a combination of “Ae Ajnabi” from “Dil Se”, and “Hum Bewafa” from “Shalimar” (without the whole tribal “jhinga-la-la” routine, gladly). Shafqat Amanat Ali Khan delivers a fine rendition of this thought-provoking song, with a combination of intensity and subtlety. What is this song doing, misplaced, on such a juvenile soundtrack? Hello? Sorry, Wrong number.

Balance sheet: Not great, by any means, and leaving a lot to be desired. It’s sad that such a robust effort is marred by lack of focus or definition in most of the tracks. Just a little more characterisation and emphasis would’ve given this album a lot more shelf life. What’s even more exasperating is the fact that if this movie eventually tanks, it will take a brilliant song like “Caravan” down with it.

One has heard that this movie is based on the book “One Night @ the Call Center”. Do you think the producers have a toll-free number for complaints?