Edsel Records
Pop, 2017

There’s a nice story behind the genesis of Belinda Carlisle’s Wilder Shores, the album that ended some ten years of her being away from the music scene. As a practitioner of Kundalini yoga, she had experienced an epiphany that led to this album: she finally understands at long last the meaning of her spiritual reawakening, and now she has to share her newfound enlightenment to all and sundry. She even took a while to master the naad, which is  the art of channeling one’s inner energies through the voice, before she felt confident enough to record this album.

Unfortunately, when I play this album, all I hear is a white woman performing Sikh chants with some sparse instrumentation in the background. Really, I’m not being facetious – there is something in the enunciation that screams white people can’t help injecting their own accent and vocalization into a language that isn’t theirs – in a way that makes the whole thing sound off. The whole thing just doesn’t flow in a natural manner.

Also, because she believes that she is a pop singer, Ms Carlisle opts to have the sound of the songs to be more like La Luna played on a loop while some woman awkwardly practices her Sikh chants in the foreground. Har Gobinday is the rare moment that things aren’t permanently dialed down to snooze mode. The rest of the lot feel too much like an oddly-dubbed Belinda Carlisle album. This is one time when going full out new age or ambient—while clichéd—would have made things far more interesting.