POP MUSIC REVIEW : Cornershop’s Tense Clash of Cultures

The music of Anglo-Indian band Cornershop comes like a distant short-wave broadcast, with droning instrumentation, semi-chanted vocals generally in an unfamiliar language and alien sounds dropping in and out as if from crossed frequencies.

The group’s L.A. concert debut on Wednesday at the Alligator Lounge added a visual equivalent, with sight lines to the sitar and tamboura players seated on the floor and the two percussionists behind them hard to find in the packed club. Singer Tjinder Singh was no less a mystery, with bangs obscuring his eyes and a curiously stone-faced manner.

This was no visit from a culturally distant Third World outpost, though, but from a center of Western civilization: London. And this was no raga-rock or bhangra techno blend accenting--like most current world-music hybrids--the similarities of disparate cultures in a romanticized melting pot. Rather, this is all square pegs and round holes, conveying a tension between Singh’s two cultures--like an aural mate to “The Buddha of Suburbia,” Hanif Kureishi’s celebrated novel of Anglo-Indian conflict.

The tone was set at the beginning with “6 A.M. Jullander Shere,” the opening track from the group’s new U.S. debut album, “Woman’s Gotta Have It,” in which Singh’s acoustic guitar, Punjabi vocals and strange tape-loop effects build a sense of uneasiness. The only English vocals came in the song “Wog,” a direct confrontation with racism.

Multicultural harmony is great in theory, but culture clashes tend to make for better art.