Track Listing

1. Broken Skin
2. Letting Go
3. Homelands
4. Pilgrim
5. Tides
6. Nadia
7. Immigrant
8. Serpents
9. Anthem Without Nation
10. Nostalgia
11. Conference
12. Beyond Skin

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #559535 in Music
• Released on: 2000-04-04
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Import

Amazon.com's Best of 2000
Deeply moving and provocative, Nitin Sawhney's Beyond Skin chronicles this British East Indian's struggle to find his identity as a citizen in a country that is not his ancestral homeland. Sawhney intelligently explores such diverse topics as identity, race, history, and atomic weapons through the eyes of a devout pacifist, while creating a musical backdrop where trip-hop, drum & bass, soul, and world music coexist peacefully. --Kevin Cole

Amazon.com
A compulsive and unclassifiable mixture of Indian classical music, flamenco, killer acoustic drum & bass, hip-hop, jazz, and soul, Beyond Skin is one of those albums that vibes in its own excellent orbit. A profoundly humanist album, Beyond Skin should further enhance Nitin Sawhney's reputation as one of Britain's most exciting and imaginative musicians. It may be based on concepts--a challenge to ideas of identity and nationality--but it's also a fluid, meditative atomic jam with the string quartet Instrumental, Marque Gilmore, Jayanta Bose, Steve Sheehan, and the nephews of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, among others. Sawhney creates some incredibly moving pieces at a slow, elegiac tempo--"Homelands" is a deep bliss-out tune in which the astonishing playing of Instrumental combines in ethereal beauty with chanting tablas and the call-and-response vocals of Bose. On "Broken Skin" and "Immigrant," Sawhney scales new heights: political songs with exhilarating melodies and sing-along soul hooks. Yes, this is music full of rare invention in which atmosphere and austerity coalesce--a music vividly constructed around textures and rhythms, glimpses, and echoes completely in tune with the tenor of our times. This is a Britpop album from the mold of ADF, Drum FM, Massive Attack, and Primal Scream. --Maxine Kabuubi

Customer Reviews

Not as good as I had hoped
I was looking forward to this CD, after having heard a bit of the exciting new Asian Breakbeat music, much of it on Sawhney's label, Outcaste. I had become quite a fan of this genre of music after listening to such incredible albums as Badmarsh & Shri's "Dancing Drums," Joi's "One and One Is One" and Talvin Singh's "OK." So I was expecting the same kind of exotic energy and catchy driving beats in Sawhney's new CD. They're not here.

This CD is surprisingly full of very mellow R&B songs, with lots of "lite" jazzy piano, soulful female crooning, and acoustic guitar work worryingly similar to the Gipsy Kings. With only a couple tracks smacking of Sawhney's Indian roots. His musicianship is good, his heart is in the right place, but the songs are overdone, the "statements" too heavy-handed.

The acid test is this: If you found Massive Attack's rather dull and white-wine-flavored instrumental "Weather Storm" the best part of their otherwise amazing CD "Protection," then you'll be a fan of Nitin Sawhney's music. If, however, you usually skip over "Weather Storm" to get at the more interesting tracks, then you'd best skip over "Beyond Skin" as well.

Simply... wonderful
This is pure beauty on a disk. Slick but real, filled with powerful imagery and beautifu lvibes, this one didn't leave my CD player for months. In the trip-hop vain but with plenty of india-real-world thrown in. You don't want this disk. You need it.

It makes you think , it makes you feel , it makes u dance...
What else can u ask for . Brilliant CD , not for Indian music fans only . Just listen to 'Homelands' and you've been at India , Spain , South America all at one track . He'll take u with these beautiful sounds all over the world and all u can do is ask for more .