It is always wonderful to come across records that are candid, reflective, and manage to strike the balance between the personal and relatable, without tipping over into incomprehensibility or an absolute dissolution into genericism. Kamakshi Khanna’s EP, Heartbreak 2020, manages to stand on that thin line and takes the shape of a sonic journal, with musings, introspections, and recollections that are immovably associated with the trials and tribulations of modern love.
The first two tracks, I Blew It! and Love Is Not A Fucking Game, are previously released singles, and the entire project has been derived from Khanna’s popular series on YouTube : The Green Room Sessions, that gained a burgeoning audience during the lockdown.
The former track is light, synth-y, and has the artist mulling over lost chances. It is one too familiar a sentiment, where one has to debate whether they have lost their cool, made the wrong impression, and inevitably managed to place their romantic future in precarity. The simplicity of expression, the almost conversational element present in the lyricism makes it the kind of a listen you turn to when you have been thrown into the wolves of self doubt by someone’s scrutinizing eyes, someone you are definitely eager to please.
Love Is Not A Fucking Game is perhaps the stand-out track of the entire EP. Khanna has released a music video for this one, where her love interest casually plays a video game featuring her as an avatar — and it thematically evokes the artist’s chagrin at being played with, as she croons, “you held me loose/and you held me tight/but you never really learnt/how to hold me right/like I wanted/but who cares what I wanted?”It has the artist displaying her vocal range, and her refreshing lower register, and perhaps it is the closest we come to her displaying a tangible form of something akin to anger, or at least disappointment, that is externalized at the other person and not filtered down to an act of self-examination.
Tourist, which begins with Khanna strumming her guitar, and has that airy quality that is characteristic to the sound of this EP. The singer-writer employs interesting imagery, and clever rhyming, as the words “Why’d you have to take me on that ferris wheel/if all you had to do was leave me/why’d you have to take me on that magic train/only to leave me in the pouring rain.” The shortest track on the EP, it is almost wistful in its tonality, as the last verse has the artist wishing she could buy a one-way ticket for her beloved, so that she could reverse the tourist status that the person has metamorphosed into.
Heartbreak 2020, the last track on the EP, is an end to the progression of the narratorial arc that Khanna constructs for herself and her listeners. It begins with her blowing her chances, then her stating her vision of love for herself, followed by the estrangement that she feels, and finally ends with a near-optimistic conclusion where she allows herself to reconcile with the fact that she craves companionship, but her cadence and delivery assures us that she does not treat this as a burdening realization that keeps her down. It is a conscious decision for her : to not feel the weight of it all.
The EP, to me, is delightfully crisp, easy on the ears, and appeals to anyone who has undergone any sort of a romantic ordeal for themselves. The songs almost arrange themselves as polaroid equivalents of emotional underpinnings, and it is always fun to come across an artist having fun with their heartache. However, what essentially is a drawback to the EP, is there is an undercurrent of withholding that is almost implicit in the artist’s work. It feels like the artist is playing it safe – while she has managed to strike a balance, and is sticking to it, she is not pushing herself to the extent she can be, with her lyricism and production. In Khanna’s acoustic performances on her YouTube channel, the less polished instrumentation makes the songs stand out in their earnestness, which gets watered down in the final product that we are offered. The singer’s lower register is also extremely pleasant, but we only get to catch a few glimpses of it, as she gravitates towards more airy light-hearted tones. It is not that this record is dull, or uninteresting, but it has moments that make any careful listener notice the potential that has been pushed down for a more popularly appellative product. Khanna has performed on some of the most prestigious stages in the world, and has accomplished incredible things from the time she has debuted — therefore it is only logical to desire more experimentation from her, because she is capable of it, and that is equivalent to having half the job done.
