ARTIST: Karsh Kale
ALBUM: Broken English
LABEL: Six Degrees, 2006
STANDOUTS: Manifest, Innocence and Power, Louder than Bombs, Rise Up
REMINDS ME OF: An East Indian Beck, Andre 3000 goes to Nepal.
Indian music is hot. The latest flavor to be eaten alive by The Hustle… By 2008, East Indian-everything will be the flavor of the month all over the US… and it’ll have a friggin’ logo on every incarnation. So, until in the meantime, you might want to get exposed to some really good Indian music before Viacom, Clear Channel, and the boys get around to programming the soul out of it.
Percussionist/DJ Karsh Kale's Broken English is one of the better albums of its kind.
My favorite cut from Broken English is the lead-off “Manifest”—it combines MC Napolean's gruff, speechy flow with and techno beats plus a few flowing chants. It's as solid as anything Timbaland might cook up, but much more authentic. So it doesn't make you want to nail nelly furtado sing a long with Missy, but it puts you in a mood to have your mind expanded.
The other cuts combine DJing, MCing, traditional East Indian chants, techno/dance, American rock ‘n’ roll, and pop tarts.
I think where Karsh and others who do the who culture mixing thing well succeed is having enough respect for different cultures and sounds to understand what’s good, what’s not and when too much is just being a leech. That was always my problem with Madonna.
I can’t believe people tolerate her bogus accent, by the way. Or her sudden let’s-give-some-poor African-kids-some-cash kick. Then again, with as much stuff as she bit from black culture, she should be cuttin’ checks to somebody darker than a suntan. Heffa still can’t sing.
Anwyay…
The rest of Broken English is anything but. If there is a drawback its that Kale’s influences are so out there that once you get rolling, you get jarred by how off some of the sounds are. As much as I dig Innocence and Power it just comes out of nowhere in relation to the rest of the songs. It’s like somebody shoved Radiohead into Tom’s Diner and told Suzanne Vega to hold the beat. (But I guess that’s what downloading is for.)
Overall Broken English is just fun experimentation. I’d really be curious as to what Karsh does next.
