***ALBUM OF THE MONTH | March 2021***
Nitin Sawhney
Immigrants
Sony Music Masterworks
Listen Below
When a nation flounders under the yolk of a morally bereft government more bothered about igniting the flames of a phony culture war to cover up its own jingoistic ineptitude than dealing with racial inequities and massive unearned financial disparities, we’re forced to look elsewhere for guidance.
Other artists have tackled the complexities of the world in its current state with great success. SAULT’s two albums of last year, for example, were street fighting music filled with raging anger and the visceral percussive energy to fuel it. Here, on his twelfth album, Nitin Sawhney adds his voice to the fray and adds layer upon layer of ruminations on identity, life as a migrant and belonging.
None of this is new to Sawhney though, after all, his second album from 1995 was entitled Migration. Here, though, he crafts an elegy for lost hopes, unrealized dreams and the futility of the boundaries drawn between people all to the accompaniment of some truly beautiful music. Music that fuses (as is his want) subtle electronic thrumming with guitar, strings, piano and instruments from all around the world, as well as vocalists that thrill at every turn.
Opening song “Down The Road” is an accurate barometer of the album’s mood. Lyrically, it offers hope (“Down the road is something better / down the road we’re getting stronger”), but the music is somewhat subdued or muted in its embrace of those notions—any optimism is tempered by the somber qualities of the music. In effect, change is coming, but you may have to wait a while. This uncertainty is grasped and hinted at throughout the album.
In between the songs are occasional interludes and the first one fuels the complex ideas that the album grapples with. Old stock audio of a news report about the influx of people from the British Empire to rebuild Britain after the Second World War fades out with its final refrain echoing: “with good intentions…” As the album progresses, stellar turn after stellar turn illuminates proceedings while seeing those intentions turned to dust.
Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s cello playing and vocals dovetail beautifully with Sawhney’s piano playing on “Movement Variation II” until it ends on a killer line that hangs like a guillotine’s blade: “No one else belongs to anybody.” Such a simple, yet withering takedown of the late-stage capitalism that feeds so much of the evil that runs rampant through the world deserves to be the final word.
The album is filled with powerful lyricism. On “Replay,” over tabla drums and electronic throbs of bass, Aruba Red gets right to the heart of Britain’s self-imposed embargo on common sense and humanity: “These invisible lines you hold so dear, a result of blood the conditions of fear / Drive us away and what will you be left with, barren lands, empty hearts, broken promises / the spoils of inactions seeping red on this blotting paper of an island we all call home.”
On “Heat And Dust” Abi Sampa and Rushil sing “From the heat and the dust / to the cold hard light / they were ready to learn / they were ready to fight” about the experiences of migrants who came to this country to rebuild a nation and were subsequently treated like second class citizens whose motives were doubted and clouded by xenophobic rhetoric.
Hand in hand with the lyrical force comes some stunningly beautiful music. On “Vai,” it is the delicate electric thrum under the piano and strings. On “Box,” it is the claustrophobic, unsettling guitar lines that combine with the sentiment of a nation crawling up its own self-mythologized backside. And on “Another Sky,” it is the cinematic beauty of Sawhney’s composition that has enough power to wring emotion from even the hardest hearted among us.
Having opened with (vague) feelings of hope, the other interludes do their best to dispel any hope, coming as they do with snippets of real interviews from news programmes about demonizing migrants from bile spouting, hate-filled racists. Yet the music is so beautiful that hope is what you are left with at the end of it all. Not some boundless, childish hope but a hope stretched and strained to breaking point, yet somehow still intact.
Nitin Sawhney is no stranger to prizes and awards for his many and varied works (a simple Wikipedia search will demonstrate that). But this is everything a great album can be and that should see him handsomely rewarded as a result. You suspect though, that the only reward he would want would be some more compassion, humanity and love in the hearts of those who would seek to run the world.
Notable Tracks: “Another Sky” | “Box” | “Heat and Dust” | “Movement Variation II” | “Replay” | “Vai”
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