Monsoon

Imagine Malcolm McLaren producing Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser's conceptual pop album set in a bhangra beat Bollywood and you're pointed in the direction of what Monsoon was.


Monsoon was a one-album project from producer Steve Coe and singer Sheila Chandra, an Englishwoman of South Indian descent. Coe's career began in the ramshackle psych-rock group Complex, though he was most prolific as a producer of Hi-NRG with a hard-candy veneer, often sung by women with a bad-girl snarl that helped him cultivate a Joan-Jett-in-the-disco vibe. Chandra, on the other hand, was a teenage actress and vocalist looking for a path to stardom. This rings like an alternative-history version of McLaren's discovery of Annabella Lwin, doesn't it?

The one LP they released, Third Eye, is a dizzying swirl of delicately-crafted synth-pop and buzzing javārī meditations structured around rather baroque pop melodies that would make Stephin Merritt envious.

After label disagreements, Monsoon dissolved, but Chandra continued to record, and Coe, who eventually became her husband, continued to produce. These records are great, though none of them seek to novelly squeeze Indian music into a Western pop mold the way Third Eye did.