Mumbai Girl Escapes to Seattle and Stumbles into Sweet Bombagrunge.
With dreams of melding the classical Indian, Sufi, and Dhol forms with a heavy pop sound, million-seller-pop-princess, Mehnaz, tripped to Seattle on a whim to stay with "friends of the family," and "hopefully" work on a new sound--more rock, less schlock. "There's a lot of hybrid stuff in Bombay, but it's mostly jazzy or watered down house music. I was looking for something more heavy and real." The dudes she stumbled into in the dark alley of the soul were a handful of Seattle's theatrical rock avant guard, Composer/Arranger Keyboardist Mark Nichols (Little Boy Goes to Hell, "Awesome," Return of the Frog Queen, Nelson Sings Nilsson, Walkabouts), Producer/guitarist Todd Fogelsonger (Soul Pimps, Trillian Green), Jimmy Thomas (Squirrels, Type-A), Ava Chakravarti (Prudence Dredge, Mass Hypnosis), Hollis (Hedwig, Sissyfist, ButtrockSuites, Ian Moore etc..), and Jarrod Kaplan (Trillian Green, Dan Bern, Cirque Du Soleil, Hanuman, Devachan etc..). Anyway, they sat around and created a half dozen manic and oft cartoony, though joyously rampant, hybrid classics "Kismet", "Quick Fix", "Om Baba", "Soulmate", "Bubbles", and the ultimate Bombaliscious deluge, "Manooghi Hi." The band may have staggered blindly into something huge, as a friend said it (best): "Holy Sacred Cow!!!?" Upon hearing the strains of "Om Baba" for the first time. Mouth agape, friend suggests Kurt Cobain has come back from the dead as a yoga instructor. If anything happened here on their debut record, titled simply, "HI", it is the explosion of a joyous and irreverent head-banging soup. Not the world music your mama used to meditate to.
--Sara Swati, special to the Mumbai Mirror.
