About

Middle Eastern psych-rock collective Al-Qasar’s debut album is an explosive mix of heavy Arabian grooves, global psychedelia and North African trance music.

The band calls it "Arabian fuzz." Brazenly electric and deeply connected.

Guests include Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys).
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When continents collide, they make a thunderous sound. Al-Qasar create the soundtrack to that fission on their full-length debut, Who Are We? It is music for a world in flux, with its ancestors deep in the past, but something that could only have been born in the 21st century. Arabian fuzz, they term it, a vision that’s brazenly electric and deeply connected to its roots.

But it had a definite starting point.

“Al-Qasar was born in the Barbès neighbourhood of Paris,” explains band leader Thomas Attar Bellier. “I’ve lived in Los Angeles, Paris, New York, Lisbon… I wanted to start a project that was in tune with the daily life of people living in these international cities, something diverse, radically colourful, with a fresh, contemporary outlook on what societies really look like today”. The musicians came together, from France, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, and the United States. Shows followed, first in France, then in Europe and the Middle East. They put out an EP, the widely-lauded Miraj, recorded in Cairo. In the same time frame, Attar Bellier collaborated with the likes of Emel Mathlouthi and Dina El Wedidi, two of the most exciting names in contemporary Arab music.

Work on Who Are We? began in December 2020, with Attar Bellier composing eight tracks that writhe and roar in skilfully controlled chaos. Bass, drums and traditional percussion create a deep, irresistible groove for the foundation, while electric saz and guitars build a wailing wall above, pulling inspiration from history as it strides into the future.

Drawing on years of experience working in Los Angeles studios, Attar Bellier produced the album. Who Are We? translates the sound that inhabited his head into something physical that stirs spirit, heart and feet. It is relentless and insistent, like a psychedelic celebration on the dancefloor, bristling with the kind of deep energy that makes Al-Qasar sound like the world’s most dangerous wedding band.

During those years spent behind the control board, Attar Bellier made some good friends in the US, and they’ve been eager to help out on the project. Alain Johannes (Queens of the Stone Age, PJ Harvey) mixed the record, and Grammy-winner Dave Collins mastered it. The Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra was a natural addition to “Ya Malak,” his inimitable voice reciting a translation of Egyptian revolutionary poet Ahmed Fouad Negm, elevating the record’s social critique while showcasing the first-ever English recording of Negm’s work.

Jello Biafra is not the only punk hero to appear on Who Are We? Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth layers textured, brooding guitar over the first two cuts, “Awtar Al Sharq” and “Awal.” The sweeping drones embrace the Moroccan bendir groove to magical results. “Lee sent me upwards of eighteen guitar tracks,” says Attar Bellier in amazement. “It was enough for an entire EP, and all so good. The hard part was deciding what not to use. Lee’s vibe just fit perfectly with what I was trying to do with the track.”

Al-Qasar’s magnetic pull drew big names from other continents, too. Hend Elrawy, the acclaimed Egyptian singer whom the band met in Cairo, brings her powerful voice to “Mal Wa Jamal”, whose Arabic lyrics promote a female-centric and humbling outlook on prostitution and its consequences. Like the other songs on the album, its social consciousness is carefully veiled in images. “Hobek Tawrat,” for instance, can be taken as a love song, with its seductive, ringing opening on the electric saz that leads up to the aching voice of New York-based Sudanese innovator Alsarah (Alsarah & The Nubatones). On the surface it offers the gliding, breathless sensuality of romance. Underneath, though, its heart is spikily political as Alsarah calls out against the coup in her homeland, rising in passion with each verse – the chorus a slogan from the recent demonstrations.

One of the band’s great coups is the track “Barbès Barbès,” an ode and homage to the neighbourhood in Paris where Al-Qasar first came together. The iconic Mehdi Haddab (Speed Caravan) added his oud virtuosity to the track. “Barbès is this edgy, amazing, historically Algerian, and still ungentrified part of the city” explains Attar Bellier. “To me, it is more typical of the way Paris really is than the Eiffel Tower, or than the Louvre. Real people live there, real culture happens there.” Haddab, who occasionally performs with the band, is famous for introducing the oud as a rock’n’roll instrument. “When he played on the track, it was as if he’d set it alight, it just came to life.”

Who Are We? is a deep, exhilarating album. Its intensity never wavers, music that pulls from the hypnotic roots of North African trance and threads it into a fabric with the elaborate beauty of Arabic scales and the shock and thrill of rock’n’roll. It is modern folklore, a reflection of the cross-cultural society we’ve become. The continents have collided, and the result is deep magic. Who Are We? Al-Qasar ask. The answer is there on the album cover. Look in the mirror. We are you and me. We are then. We are here. We are now. And we are tomorrow. — (via Label)

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Enlisting radical US veterans Lee Ranaldo and Jello Biafra, alongside the rising generation of rebel poets, political exiles and roots-rock revolutionaries forged during the Arab Spring, polyglot Parisians Al-Qasar whip up a globalised psych-rock storm on this gutsy debut. The band bill their self-styled “Arabian Fuzz” sound as an authentic snapshot of multicultural Paris in 2022: this loosely translates as an agreeably grimy mongrelised mixtape of punk, grunge and garage-rock signifiers interwoven with gnawa, rai and desert blues influences, all overlaid with Arabic and Berber-language lyrics.

Al-Qasar were formed by guitarist and oud player Thomas Attar Bellier, a veteran of various psych and prog-metal bands, and sometime collaborator with feted Middle Eastern artists like Emel Mathlouthi. The project began as a more fluid collective featuring Bellier alongside various friends, mostly poets from the Arab world. They recorded their first EP, Miraj, in Cairo. But as this debut album began to take shape, the lineup solidified into a more traditional rock group based in Paris, fronted by Moroccan vocalist Jaouad El Garouge. Both live and on record, Al-Qasar present as a fairly conservative set-up with drums, bass, guitars, leather jackets, sunglasses and wild facial hair. But there are more experimental post-rock drones and avant-metal textures buried in the mix too, amd a rich array of Middle Eastern and North African instruments like the electric saz, bendir, darbuka and sagat.

Al-Qasar’s earliest rehearsals and live shows took place in Barbès, a grungy, un-gentrified, historically Arab district of Paris. Indeed, they pay tongue-in-cheek tribute to the area here with the doomy, propulsive, swampy track “Barbès Barbès”. Rich in theatrical drama and ironic humour, this lyrical paean to low-rent lives and illicit parties also features feted Franco-Algerian oud player Mehdi Haddab of Speed Caravan fame, whose long list of previous collaborators include legendary rai icon Rachid Taha and Damon Albarn’s Africa Express collective.

Bellier initially contacted Ranaldo through mutual friends with the idea of recording together in Sonic Youth’s New York studio, but Covid got in the way. Instead, the veteran guitar-mangler sent over a mountain of treatments, which feed onto two of the album’s stand-outs. The short opening instrumental “Awtar Al Sharq” is a mood-setting swirl of plucked strings, drones and stormy clatter. But the more muscular, expansive “Awal” is a full-blooded set-piece anthem, with an incantatory Arabic lyric that builds from guttural growl to siren howl, its propulsive overdriven rhythm sounding almost like a Franco-Maghrebian variant of krautrock.

Bellier’s connections to US punk godfather Jello Biafra, as a former member of his sometime backing band Spindrift, also pay off here with “Ya Malak”, a coldly furious rant against political corruption and social inequality laid over a punchy, percussive tangle of strings, drums and strings. Initially sounding fuzzy and remote, then boomingly close, Biafra’s signature blowtorch scorn makes a good match for the spoken-word lyric by Egyptian revolutionary poet Ahmed Fouad Negm, an auspicious vehicle for his debut English translation. “Who are they and who are we?” Biafra howls. “They are the emirs and they are the sultans… they wear the latest fashions, but we live seven in a single room”.

Although Who Are We? is a fairly testosterone-heavy affair, several of the strongest tracks are driven by female vocalists and feminist-slanted messages. Outwardly a romantic song, the percussive, kinetic, feverish “Hobek Thawrat” features Sudanese-American siren Alsarah – aka Sarah Mohamed Abunama-Elgadi, the daughter of political exiles and human rights activists – who clothes her call for revolution back home in the wily ambiguous language of love poetry. Meanwhile, mighty closer “Mal Wa Jamal” showcases Egyptian vocalist Hend Elrawy, who paints an empathetic portrait of sex workers over a bass-throbbing, string-plucking, centrifugal racket that invokes Primal Scream in their future-punk prime.

In places, Al-Qasar still sound like the embryonic work in progress that they are, while Who Are We? is sometimes let down by its oddly staid faith in the bludgeoning moral force of declamatory, sloganeering urchin-rock. Alien beauty, pop glamour and wild new sonic horizons can also be revolutionary voices for change. But there is a healthy spread of sense-rupturing potential and exhilarating skronk here, from the petrochemical protest anthem “Benzine” to the funky, discordant instrumental “Sham System”. Bellier and his gang are not reinventing the wheel, but they are making a potent racket with gusto, passion and cool outlaw swagger. — (via Uncut)

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Label: Glitterbeat, The Arabian Fuzz 
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Released: 2022
Genre: Rock, Folk, World, & Country
Style: Psychedelic Rock

File under: Global Sounds
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