Don't Climb the Pyramids

The Barbarity label is perhaps learning from past experience. Many of their past releases (usually of Moroccan-based musicians) have attempted to fuse West and African pop, but have gone too heavy on the bombastic electronics and dancefloor percussion. That flaw is absent from this release, which, oddly enough, sounds about like what you'd expect from the collaboration of European rock-based musicians and trad-based Egyptian ones. It's balanced pretty evenly between the two poles, something you don't often find in such endeavors, which are usually weighted heavily towards one or the other extremes. Sometimes the extremes are more evident: "Chadi," as they claim in the liner notes, is how "a traditional soudanese melody goes creole"; on the beginning of the ballad "Treasure," they sound almost like a wispy 4AD band or something. It's respectable and pleasant listening, but one gets the feeling that it doesn't quite realize the ambitions of the musicians to draw from a wealth of elements and create something greater than the sum of the parts.