This album is very deceptively packaged and presented, but in the best way possible: the tame cover art and the word "folk" did nothing at all to prepare me for the extremely fun and quirky pseudo-surf gems within.  Of course, many of these pieces were originally folk songs, but they have been so jazzed-up with kitschy organs and twangy, tremelo-happy guitars as to make that term a wildly misleading understatement. Curator Stuart Ellis has assembled an improbable monster of a compilation.
Ellis unknowingly started working on this album in 2005, when he begun making mix CDs (and then box sets) of obscure world music for himself and his friends.  Gradually, he became more and more interested in how rock music manifested itself in non-western cultures.  Also, his record scavenging and trading began bringing him in contact with like-minded people scattered across the world. As a result, the project quickly blossomed into the excellent blog Radiodiffusion Internationaal and eventually led to the curation of 2008's Bollywood Steel Guitar compilation on Sublime Frequencies.Although Ellis's blog isn’t especially fixated on Pakistan (his tastes are pretty wide-ranging), the period covered here is pretty fascinating, largely undocumented, and quite short-lived: the Pakistani's embraced rock in a big way, but the recorded evidence of that phase does not sound much like any American or British rock that was happening (except for maybe the Ventures or The Shadows).  It is easy to see why he chose it for a subject.
The handful of artists collected on this double album are an eclectic bunch, ranging from respected film composers to largely forgotten bands that only managed to release one single.  Or sometimes even less, as The Bugs just got the B-side of the Do Raha soundtrack single and The Bluebirds' sole recorded output is just a few pieces on a film music compilation.  The material itself is no less varied, as the only way to get a record released at the time was to either cover a traditional song with rock instrumentation (possibly with some electric sitar thrown in) or to contribute to a film soundtrack.
Within those unusual confines, however, these young musicians went in some unexpected and inspired directions.  For example, The Panthers spice up the traditional "Bhairvi" with swooning, woozy guitars, while The Bugs pump up the thumping Do Raha theme with enthusiastic electric sitar and a catchy accordion motif.  My favorite piece is probably the noir-ish/spy movie-sounding "Aay Jays Theme," but this is a surprisingly good album from start to finish.  I suspect a lot of that has to do with the fact that this whole project has been organically unfolding for so long that throwing together two albums of killer Pakistani rock for a compilation was no problem at all for Ellis.  As a whole, I prefer the more "garage rock" interpretations to the more psych-inspired ones or those that just sound like folk songs played on the wrong instruments, but I never find myself skipping anything when I put this album on–Stuart's judgment is unerring.  In fact, I find that I like a lot of these pieces much more than I like the Western bands that influenced them.
Of course, the Pakistan captured here is quite a different place from Pakistan now, as long hair, rock music, wild nightlife, and drugs were pretty damn rampant during that country's brief cultural explosion.  Unfortunately, all good things must end and that momentum came to an abrupt end when a 1977 coup resulted in the institution of a markedly less rockin' and hashish-friendly Islamic state, causing many of the key musicians in the scene to move to North America and the UK.  Notably, Ellis has actually managed to contact some of them over the years and was often greeted with bewildered questions like "Why do you like this stuff?" or "Why do you care?"  That, of course, is the hallmark of any truly great Sublime Frequencies compilation: finding great music so ephemeral and forgotten that even the musicians themselves are left baffled and surprised.
Samples:
- The Aay Jays - "The Aay Jays Theme"
- The Panthers - "Bhairvi"
- The Bugs - "Theme from "Do Raha""
 
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