(Ribbon Music)
RECOMMENDED
47 year-old Syrian dabke singer Souleyman has exercised in an unbroken tradition of poetic party music -- derived from traditional Middle Eastern songforms -- for decades, and one can be forgiven if it seems as though the fascination by various alt-rock luminaries with his work (Damon Albarn, Björk, and now Four Tet) carries the tiniest hint of cynicism. After hearing this record, I sampled a few of the hundreds of bootleg recordings of Souleyman enthusiastically belting at weddings and thought of how the last thing his sophisticated, exuberant music needs is to be appropriated as mere flavor for someone's rock festival or, worse yet, rock record or indie label.
Happily, Four Tet, acting as producer for Wenu Wenu, captures Souleyman without compromise and without covering up or smoothing out his almost confrontationally celebratory repertoire of spiritually exhilarating, bombastic gulps, yelps and wails. Souleyman is always as subservient to melody as any pop singer -- which perhaps anticipates his popularity in the West -- but he has ferociously commanding and virtuosic way with a tune. Speeding up, slowing down, guttural and sweet in rapid succession, he seems often to be singing both above and below the melody but engaging with it beautifully. I can't comment with great intelligence upon the lyrics, sung in at least three languages, but despite the fact that all seven of these cuts are rapid-fire body music, Souleyman's voice in and of itself expresses a spectacular range of emotional thought, accessible and challenging at once.
Four Tet's own records are hit and miss, especially lately, so much as when Beck took on Charlotte Gainsbourg's IRM back in 2010, it must be said that it's a relief he subsumes his own preference toward slick repetition and sonic gimmickry in favor of helping to craft a record that's truly stylistically adventurous, in and outside the context of nonwestern music courting an American audience. The legacy of Wenu Wenu as a part of what's likely to become a massive recorded legacy is just how well it captures the sophistication and courageous weirdness of Souleyman's vocal interactions with the brilliant keyboardist Rizan Sa'id, whose work here is sufficiently staggering that there are times he seems to deserve the role of session leader more than Souleyman himself. As traditionalist as this music is, the layering Kieran Hebden parses out without interfering with the band interplay and the wiry, playful, sometimes even menacing keyboard lines of Sa'id spin it into something that seems quite new, and entirely unique.
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