In almost every review covering any recent Pakistani album, there’ll usually be a line that waves a flag celebrating the album as an important cultural phenomenon that must be protected and encouraged at all costs. Full disclaimer: this review will be no different.

For many Pakistanis, though, the medium of the album has none of the cultural attachments that it does in the West. We have no long history of essential discographies — most of us know Pakistani bands through a series of singles and music videos. Our South Asian musical history has never emphasised a singular body of work to be important. That 40 to 60-minute sequence has never been a yardstick of an artist. Instead, the artist is judged over a much longer timeline, on how they carry tradition forward through renditions, adding their own flavour, and maybe a few original compositions of their own.

So, it’s in this odd landscape that every Pakistani musician and band makes music now — knowing, intrinsically, that the average Pakistani listener probably doesn’t care about albums, and yet nonetheless having some kind of magnetic attraction to the idea of the album as a valuable artistic medium.

I’ve only been to Sindh once, and by Sindh, I mean Karachi, and by Karachi I mean DHA, for a week, visiting relatives. That puts me in a terrible position to review Saanjhi [Twilight], the new album by The Sketches, a band that has always had a deep attachment to the music and culture of Sindh.

For the Sketches, the Indus Valley is so rich in heritage and tradition precisely because, like a jungle, it refuses to be tamed, growing in whichever direction it pleases. In their latest offering, Saanjhi, recorded in multiple countries over a span of several years, they try to incorporate that wild spirit

But while listening to the stunning opening track, Ishq Laga Mann Jaga, any fears I had of cultural alienation were washed away. Saanjhi is an album that is at once universal yet achingly personal, an album that reaches outwards while blooming inwards. You can feel it in the expansive compositions that stretch out to a distant horizon, but also collapse inwards like they’re being whispered into your ear. The effect is like peering into a toy kaleidoscope, and watching the patterns reflect infinitely like a miniature cosmos.

I spoke to Saif Samejo, front man of The Sketches, mainly out of an anxiety that I might not ‘understand’ the music from my outsider’s perspective. I asked him about the album’s use of multiple languages — Urdu, Sindhi, Seraiki and Hindi — and variety of indigenous poetry from that of Hassan Dars to Shah Latif Bhittai’s. Was this diversity a statement of some kind?

“The Indus Valley is home to so many different and diverse cultures,” he said, “but they all drink the same water.” This is the duality that Saanjhi tries to speak of, the dialogue between many and one, the outer and the inner.

Most of this dialogue is done through the acoustic guitar. Unlike their previous album You, where the compositions were much more complex and used many more traditional South Asian folk instruments, on Saanjhi the primary recurring instrument is the simple acoustic guitar. Samejo described this as their most mature and minimalist album, and that’s immediately noticeable.

The acoustic guitar allows the compositions to layer around it, but provides a necessary melodic staple that stops any of these songs from meandering aimlessly or sounding excessively thin. In fact, most of these tracks are some of the pop-iest folk songs The Sketches have ever written.

Panchion Ka Gaoon feels like a classic road song, the soundtrack for a traveller staring out to a distance. Faani Aur Baqa is a classic love ballad, achingly simple in its composition and structure. Here, The Sketches go back to basics, more interested in raw feeling than technique.

This is reflected in the way the album was recorded: a year-long process and in numerous different countries. When the band was in Nepal, they gathered musicians and recorded wherever they were available; on balconies, in bedrooms, outdoors. Studio time requires administration and certain protocols that can slow down the creative process and push musicians out of their comfort zones. By choosing to be more extempore with the whole process, Samejo says the band was able to focus in on the feeling rather than the technical aspects.

In fact, this is perhaps the first Sketches album that doesn’t feature too much experimentation. Everything that they do here, instrumentally and structurally, seems comfortable and reassured. The final track, Aashiq Mast Jalali, is the exception, featuring heavy electric guitars and rock drums. But the song is the one misstep in the album, feeling far too detached from the tone of the rest of the tracks, upsetting the otherwise fantastic cohesion of sound.

“This land, this society… it’s a jungle, not a garden.” As our conversation draws to an end, Samejo says this, and I wonder what he means. I assume it’s the standard ‘dog-eat-dog’ world analogy; nature is ruthless and we must work against it. But, after a few more questions, it’s almost the opposite. The garden — a pruned, organised, clinical space — doesn’t offer the diversity and wealth of a jungle. For the Sketches, the Indus Valley is so rich in heritage and tradition precisely because it refuses to be tamed, growing in whichever direction it pleases.

Saanjhi, then, is not an attempt to document, or to archive, or to even understand the music of the Indus Valley. Instead, Samejo says, it’s just a sonic form of ‘mehsoos karna’. The musical equivalent of just listening or feeling.

It’s here that the medium of the album proves to be something worthwhile, something worth fighting for in Pakistani music, even if it may be a somewhat alien medium. This meta-chamber — of listening to a band as they themselves listen — only works over the course of multiple songs stitched together in a longer narrative. The pieces form the whole.

After we talk, I go back and listen to the opening track Ishq Laga Mann Jaga again. The jungle metaphor seems much more apt now. The track seems all the more atmospheric, blooming with texture and depth and soul. The Sketches are a band that have been digging into the musical dirt of Indus Valley for the past decade. On Saanjhi, they may have produced their most beautiful album yet.

You can’t understand it, it can only be felt.

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 5th, 2020