The group's name suggests that the music is going to be like licking white hot, blistering, celestial comet trails as I soar through the universe in a multicolored ball of pure musical ecstasy. Unfortunately I am always disappointed by the "free" folk that greets me when I press play. On their second self-titled album, things have not improved much. There is nothing here to make me change my stance on the music; I still find them entirely impenetrable.
Hapna
The man behind A Taste of Ra, Nicolai Dunger, obviously has some ambitions for A Taste of Ra to be fluid, unrestrained and elemental but he still has not achieved this goal. I think he can do it but I wonder how many albums it will take before he gets there. Maybe in the future I will come back to his work and appreciate something crucial that I have missed but in the meantime I am not particularly enamoured with this album.
The album starts off with "37 Turns 'round You," a formless and uninteresting introduction. It is based around some aimless piano noodling which might have been listenable on its own but Dunger decides to add some haphazardly played tin whistle to the piece. It may be just conditioning from my tin whistle lessons as a child but every track featuring the out of tune nasal noise of Dunger's tin whistle playing is a chore to listen to. I think the feeling that is meant to be elicited by the devil-may-care approach to all the wind instruments on this album is one of freedom from traditional song structures. Unfortunately it just sounds like they do not know how to play these instruments. Only the odd time does the loose approach to song structure come together, such as on the song “Mother” or the album’s closer “Radhe-Shyam in Bliss Land” but by the time I get to these tracks it is too little, too late.
Before I come across as too gloomy about this album, there are some nice points. The guitars that introduce “Indian Love Call (Continues to Call)” are gorgeous. Alas, the tin whistle returns and masks the sound of both them and the vocals. The vocals on most of the album are not bad at all; Dunger’s voice is a comfortable middle ground between Will Oldham’s old man of the mountains and Marc Bolan’s young man of the woods. Occasionally the lyrics are a little corny but for the most part they are enjoyable. The female harmony on the aforementioned “Radhe-Shyam in Bliss Land” combined with a violin make it one of the most beautiful parts of the album, standing head and shoulders above the rest of the disc.
This album is a hodgepodge of instruments and voices thrown together in an attempt to sound free but in the end A Taste of Ra are imprisoned by a lack of clear vision. Many of the songs make it sound like Dunger is trying to be eccentric just for the sake of it; "The Fox and the Frog" being a fitting example of this as a very proper sounding female voice tells a children's story over a wandering folky background. This story should grab my attention but this piece is so easy to ignore. The entire album is easy to ignore, while it is not bad, it is simply not engaging enough.
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