Bheema Sondtrack

Harris Jeyaraj is the one with highest success rate among his contemporaries. The reason is that he constantly delivers songs with simple, easy, catchy rhythms and melodies that instantly hook the casual listeners. Who cares about innovation and experimentation? What a casual moviegoer or a casual music listener wants is an immediately head shakable tune and that is what Harris delivers again and again with utmost success. Harris’s songs are crowd pleasing spoon feeds than ground breaking experimentations. The maximum experiment you can find in his songs is the way he uses different meaningless vocal sounds and words instead of a humming or a ‘lalala’ version of the tune in the interludes and preludes.

Apart from the fact that Harris is in fine form in Bheema, what I am surprised the most about is the beauty of songs with simple and minimal orchestration and clearly audible lyrics. No song has too many instruments or sounds or loops overlapping. At the maximum you can listen four layers running in parallel and that applies even to the only folk number ‘Rangu Rangamma’ (which usually is deliberately made to be loud) in an otherwise all-melody soundtrack. Infact Harris throws some surprises in this song by going completely western classical in the interludes which is otherwise a folk number.

One big relief is that I didn’t get a sounds-like feel in any of the songs in the soundtrack which was an ordinary thing to happen when you listen to a Harris’s soundtrack for the first time. Also there are no usual Harris’s clichés like club beats or stylized singing except for few strange humming here and there. The hero introduction songs of Harris’s are always unusually more techno and sophisticated than any others and like ‘Karka Karka’ from ‘Vettaiyadu Vilayadu’, ‘Oru Mugamo’ is an effective hero introduction song without much ado. Krish definitely is coming out of his effeminate singing style and this song is a proof of it.

It is good to hear singers like Hariharan in two pleasant melodies of the soundtrack. So ‘Enadhuyirae’ is the long promised song in Harris’s composition for the Airtel super singer winner ‘Nikhil Mathew’. He makes an impressive debut. But why the breathing sounds in between the lines are so deliberately and distractingly loud. Is it to prove that the singers have sung these lines in a single take without punches or is it the side effects of having a crystal clear sound mix?

Harris’s Bheema is a strong and solid hit material.

Chennai Kadhal Soundtrack

Vikraman for the second time comes out of his in-house composers like S.A.Rajkumar and Sirpi but not wholeheartedly. His first break-up happened when Rahman scored for Puthiya Mannargal. Though it was not Rahman’s best, it had one of my all time favourite preludes in a Rahman song in “Eduda Antha Sooriya Melam”. Other than that Vikraman made even Rahman to compose tunes in S.A.Rajkumar way. “Chennai Kadhal” also falls in the same category; the combination with Joshua Sridhar just doesn’t work. This could be Joshua’s first bad soundtrack.

Vikraman seems to have interfered a lot in Joshua’s work. Almost all the songs have forgettable tunes. Earlier in Kadhal, Uyir and Aran, I didn’t complain about his composition sounding very Rahmanish, because it sounded very good but in this album, it goes to unbearable limits especially in the song “Silu Silukkum” which is a poor imitation of Rahman’s “Eguri Kudhithaen” from Boys. I thought may be just the first two lines sounds the same, but when I heard the two interludes, I thought Joshua disappointed big time in this song.

I think Vikraman asked S.A.Rajkumar to compose tune for the song “Thimirae” and asked Joshua to setup modern arrangements for the tune. It is that bad. It is high time, Joshua stops writing theme music for every other movie, the way he uses the title ‘Chennai Kadhal’ in the theme tune with techno-sounds and beats in the background is as bad as it can get. “Enjoy Ithu Irubathu” is a typical hero introduction song with insane Tanglish lyrics also it has Blaaze’s rap. “Salladai Salladai” and “Rendamjaamam” are typical Vikraman style of folks songs and has nothing much to offer, you can easily press the skip button for these two songs, you won’t miss anything. Rhythm and tune of “Angel angel Kannil pattadhu” sounds very much like “Chumma Chumma” song from Charlie Chaplin movie.

On the whole, it is a soundtrack you can stay away from.