The Singles Jukebox

We don’t like the song much, but Anoushka’s dress/nails co-ordination is beyond reproach.

[Video][Website]
[4.71]

Crystal Leww: Anoushka Shankar’s work is really gorgeous and light. Norah Jones floats over the sitar and tabla sounding exactly like what the image of Norah Jones has become: pretty and empty or pretty and soulful depending on who you ask. Her presence shouldn’t be uncomfortable; she is, after all, the daughter of Ravi Shankar, but something tells me that “Traces of You” is going to get filed away into lots of upper middle class iTunes libraries as “World Music” as a little token of diversity in a library made by and mostly consumed by white people. Neither artist’s fault, but it just doesn’t sit right.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Shankar hired Norah Jones for — well, what exactly? Her narcoleptic act barely works when fronting one of her lounge-act pieces; here, required to project amid a sophisticated arrangement she isn’t even interesting bric-a-brac.
[3]

Brad Shoup: The first thing I thought of is Shania Twain’s marginalized Blue mix for Up! Mad genius that she is, Twain set her sights on Indian film music just before disappearing behind the curtain for eleven years and counting. Twain’s importation of “world-music” tropes stands in contrast to Jones’ participation on her sister’s sitar-pop composition, of course. Shankar is the true mover here: 2011’s Traveler bashed flamenco against Hindustani music in hope of sparks. Now she’s paired with someone who’s moved Twain-level units: looking for pop success without pop acquiescence, perhaps. Jones’ tone-poem fragments chase each other as in a round, while an acoustic figure and martial taps betray a fundamental distrust in Shankar’s harmolodic abilities. It ends up sounding quite a bit like turn-of-the-century Jim O’Rourke, or Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me.” Neither is a bad thing to sound like, but the former knew how to stretch out, and the latter had a chorus. This has the trappings of pop, but also pop’s tendency to skim emotional depths. “Traces of You” calls for someone with a more fraught relationship to success.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: It’s been decades since Indian classical instruments played a prominent role in Western pop, so if this recalls the late 60s and early 70s moment when even country-pop singers could be backed by the ocasdionsl sitar slide, that’s maybe more a function of history than of anything that the Shankar girls are doing. Norah’s creamily dispassionate voice turns a refrain into a mantra, Anoushka’s emotional intelligence turns a rhythmic drone into a pop hook, and the way the whole thing adds up to a buzzing evocation of the sensory impressions and emotional contours of memory is as deft as anything in poetry.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Anoushka is an excellent sitar player, and I have enjoyed the vocal power of Jones sometimes, and so the two sisters together might produce something interesting, however this piece of soppy exotica is not it. 
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Pretty, but superfluous; with both artists you pretty much know what you’re getting, but for Anoushka albums there’s Rise and for Norah Jones collaborators there’s the driftier, floatier “Easy.”
[5]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Sitar and sister narrative aside, is there a German term for “waiting for a Jose Gonzales cover of The Knife to begin”?
[5]