Semitics

It’s been said 47SOUL are a band rooted in the Palestinian diaspora. Surely ‘uprooted’ would be more to the point. 47SOUL’s Tareq Abu Kwaik, Ramzy Suleiman and Walaa Sbait live in exile in London and thrive off a global network of dispossessed Palestinians and their sympathisers. The sound is a new one, blending traditional Levantine wedding music (dabke) with Western dance-floor modes, to constitute a new indie pop-flavoured style – what the band has dubbed shamstep, in essence electronic music that uses Arabic scales. Their aim: to get people dancing. But is there anything less conducive to dance floor euphoria than the intractable situation in the Middle East? A definite buzz-kill it would seem. However, as Balkan Gypsy music shows, dance and sadness can often go hand in hand. In fact sadness makes the experience of dance all the more profound, leading potentially to a catharsis as strong as that of intoxication.

47SOUL have a heavy message, and it weighs upon the listener more so in this latest album than in the first one, as even the potentially danceable numbers are cut through with the melancholy of an impossibly intransigent situation. There are fewer numbers that give over to joyful dabke dancing here, and more that are conducive to gloomy rumination, kicking against the pricks of the Middle East reality.