Kalashnik Love

www.realworldrecords.com/speedcaravan

This site has a penchant for wide-ranging musical acts that mix up styles to come up with something fresh. If Jon Allen’s album has the best clutch of actual songs we have heard this year thus far, Speed Caravan’s album has the most sonic impact. Led by oud warrior Mehdi Haddab, a man who owns up to being angry about a lot of things (and isn’t Neil Young ?) this quartet and their friends set about making these own compositions and a few telling covers spring to life with an electric insistence, tone colours galore and a splash of mysticism.

Opener ‘Tag On The Beat’ made me exclaim ‘Ha! Rachid Taha fans !’ and indeed on reading the notes the great man appears on the version of ‘Killing An Arab’. But a few plays and Speed Caravan’s own character is quickly established. Hey, we could all tell Rory Gallagher had heard of Muddy Waters but look where he took his music.

The twisting oud dances, chatters, floats and snarls over the percussion, electric bassruns (Pascal Teillet) and Hermione Frank’s computer and electronic polyrhythms. Drummer Mohamed Bouamar is on the money, brittle and funky by turns. Extra guitars stoke up the brew as the Arabic bluesrock riffs hammer out and desert soundscapes shift into dark city street mode. ‘Dubai’ has an edgy attach and a gritty vocal that sounds conspiratorial, many miles from the spliffed-out jasmined night air of, say, LZ’s ‘Kashmir’, urgency supplanting mindwandering. This is a beast of a recorded outing, produced with a sharp ear by David Hussar. Absorbing rather than alienating, these ostensibly foreign sounds spin a web that is hard to resist.

And yet for all the tension that the band naturally fall into and tumble along to, there is a moment of pure sex/romance on the splendid ‘Erotic Chiftetelli’ with its spacey wah-tinged tones and  middle-of-the-night yearning. If the likes of ‘Galvanise’ are a tad close to being preachy, this cut at least shows another more sensual side. Most of the time the set is taken at unsettling tempo’s, albeit deftly showcasing that group’s musical skill. You could say the same of side one of Talking Heads’ ‘Remain In Light’, of course. Haddad’s oud is often reminiscent of Adrian Belew ’s guitar styling, dynamics exploited over grooves.

If the zippy ‘Daddy Lolo’ doesn’t move you and your feet you definitely have been overdoing it lately…and the subtle layering of ‘Aissa Wah’ and its sinister tread would surely intrigue any conneisseur of rock dynamics as the drums harden up at precisely the right point. Jagged theme interludes slot right in. There’s a delicious electricity to this group and in a just world they would be up for the next Bond theme…

Pete Sargeant    www.fairhearing.co.uk