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CD Review
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Afro-Pop World Wide, CD Review >>
Algerian singer songwriter Souad Massi has a voice supple and nuanced enough to take on Arabic classical music. That vocal quality and her Arabic language are among the only things that would hint at her Algerian past on her first two albums. Though beautiful, they seem more concerned with establishing her as a melancholy, folk-pop chanteuse, more a product of Paris than Algiers.
This, Massi’s third and best album, looks homeward with an exquisite blend of affection, nostalgia, alienation and horror. The tormented romances she sings about are easily read as metaphor for her broken love affair with Algeria itself. On the cantering, flamenco-tinged opener, Kilyoum (Soon)”, she longs to “sit by your side” and tell “what I’ve suffered…what I’ve lost.” A free-thinking, creative woman, schooled in rock n’ roll as much as Arabic traditions, and determined to perform publicly, Massi had no future in the Algeria of the 90s, in which culture wars produced a sizeable body count. But France has hardly proven a perfect home either. Massi lives amid the very neighborhoods that recently exploded with the frustration of immigrant life. Here, Massi embraces her estranged homeland without illusions. On the title track, she “misses the streets of my childhood…and even those who hurt me.”
The music amplifies this subtext in her use of old traditional instruments like mandol and bendir. On “Khalouni (Let Me),” she sings a duet with her percussionist Rabah Khalifa in style of pre-World War II rai, when that music was still the cloistered fare of bordellos and cabarets. On the sensational “Denya Wezmen (That’s life),” she evokes the raw, edgy vocal of Algerian’s marginalized, mountain-dwelling Amazight (Berber) people. Though indelibly marked by Paris, Massi now puts forward a decidedly African identity, underscoring the point in a searing duet with Senegalese singer Daby Toure, “Manensa Asli/Miwawa (I Won’t Forget My Roots).” The musical textures throughout these eleven songs are exquisite. Using an array of styles and skills, Massi struggles movingly to forge a coherent identity from her shattered past, rather like Algeria itself.
-Banning Eyre 12/16/05 >> go there
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