Bahdeni nami

"On much of the album, repetition crosses into redundancy, especially true on the two Modeselektor-produced tracks, "Tawwalt El Gheba" and "Enssa El Aatab". Both have a four-on-the-floor thump that imitates migraine pain above all else. It's not because of the four-on-the-floor though; it's because the music keeps cycling back on itself without a sense of having moved anywhere or varied much. This monolithic feeling ends up overshadowing some of the more interesting '80s synth music and acid house moments on the album, where the tightly-coiled keyboard solos recall variously a reedy mijwiz (a double-pipe reed instrument), a distorted psych rock guitar, even a Moog. Listening to Bahdeni Nami as a whole can feel borderline-masochistic".

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"For those unfamiliar with the music of Omar Souleyman, the Syrian wedding singer who transformed traditional dabke music into a hyperactive electronic stomp, it's not like much else. It's so fast that the only appropriate way to engage with it is to wriggle your limbs. Melodies are both abrasive and ebullient, chattering endlessly like raucous birdsong ... The title track is irresistible, while Enssa El Aatab's trilling percussion propels it through its 10-minute runtime. There is even, by Souleyman's standards, a slow jam in the shape of the melancholic Darb el Hawa. His formula may not have been reinvented, but it has been refined, and now is the time to listen".

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"His second international studio release, with producers Four Tet, Gilles Peterson and Modeselektor getting the best from a band comprising keyboards and a long-necked lute: a rudimentary thump-thump-thump, dizzying soloing and simple, chanted lyrics. If itøs not immediately obvious what such vaunted DJs see in Souleyman, Legowelt's remix of the title track spells out the floor-filling qualities - it's hard to sit down all the way through".