Directed by Ken Ghosh, Chance Pe Dance is a rags to riches story of a dancer who is struggling to make it to the top of his career. Genelia D’Souza plays his love interest, a choreographer. The Chance Pe Dance soundtrack delivers a variety of songs that line up exactly with what I would expect a film called Chance Pe Dance to deliver. And by “variety”, I mean there are seven upbeat dance numbers and two remixes. This bodes well for dance fans, since we are almost guaranteed that Shahid Kapoor will break it down in most, if not all, of these song picturizations.
With an album built on contemporary dance songs, I would have expected that the music director would be somebody like Pritam or Himesh Reshamiya or, at the very least, the album would contain a mix songs from artists like RDB, who are known for doing dance numbers. Instead, the Chance Pe Dance music director is Adnan Sami, a novice at writing for Bollywood films, although he has a solid record as a playback singer and for his albums. However, Adnan’s tuneful croon can’t disguise the fact that this album still has the training wheels on.
Pe… Pe… Pepein (Male) starts things off with a bang! Written by Pritam and featuring Hard Kaur, the song is pure pop delight. Neeraj Shridhar and Saleem Shehzada trade off vocals in between the catchy choruses of “pe… pe… pepein”. If you download one song from the album, make it this one. The alternate version is just as fun but adds a female voice into the mix with Tulsi Kumar.
After the professional touches on ‘Pe…Pe… Pepein’, the rest of the album sounds like amateur hour. Next up is the plodding Pump It Up, which even the Vishal half of Vishal-Shekhar can’t save. Combining beat boxing, piercing synthesizers, and a whole host of club mix sounds, ‘Pump It Up’ is the kind of song that is better suited for dancing to than listening to and the remix proves this by not only being better than the original but is actually quite enjoyable for a club track.
Pal Mein Hi is the token romantic track, which uses the Spanish guitar as subtly as a sledgehammer in order to mitigate the pounding bass line. The song is a duet but poor Shreya Ghoshal is left doing the work of two, as her male counterpart, Soham, tries for low-budget Sonu Nigam but doesn’t quite make it. The backing track is a mess of percussion and drum machine and never gels into anything solid.
One More Dance sounds like a bad remix; Yaba Daba Yahoo is painfully trite.
Rishta Hai Mera squanders the talents of Shaan, who almost sounds embarrassed to be singing. The track includes Beatles-esque guitars, 80s synthesizer hits, desi drum break-downs, and every MIDI sound effect Adnan Sami could find on his Yamaha keyboard.
A hilarious mixture of faux-rap sounds and DJ record scratching starts off Just Do It. In a different context, this might have been tolerable but in context of the rest of the album, it’s just funny – a very basic conception of what rap music might sound like to someone who knows it only from episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
While each of these tracks has the potential to be an entertaining song picturization, taken as a whole, as music, the album is a miserable failure. The one bright spot is Pritam’s ‘Pe… Pe… Pepein’, which is a quality pop song.
