I liked Talvin's second solo release, OK, but I LOVED this new effort. Apparently, I'm the only one. After I did some research online, I was rent aghast to learn that nearly every 'reputable' and 'official' critic on the scene shit all over this breath-of-fresh air in an otherwise rotting, putrid, stench-filled cesspool of a fusion landscape we were living in.
Here's an edited quote from one particular reviewer : "It's only the electro-melt of 'Uphold'.... Silver Flowers'... that don't appear to have been mashed up for easy digestion by a manipulator of our desire to be culturally literate without any of the groundwork that involves."
So, according to this "authority," Talvin's new album is too hard to enjoy cuz of all the foreign cackling present on some tracks; that Talvin didn't have the foresight and instinct like Nitin Sawhney to pump his vision full of r+b crappola to make it sell to the empty-headed and culturally bland.
Perhaps Talvin himself puts it best by saying, "The big problem is the media, not the audience... these guys do not want you to move on with something new. On the other hand, if you keep doing the same thing, they don't like that either. Worst of all, they don't even really understand what you've been doing in the first place."
Perhaps people don't know how to react since the album is less "asian underground" and more something else.
Any amount of posturing won't diminish the fact that this cd is only now (2003) being hailed as the masterpiece that it always was. [The same fate awaits Karsh Kale's Liberation, receiving due credit somewhere near the year twenty-oh-nine...]
Guest vocals from Ustad Sultan Khan.
