Album Review
by SashaS
21-5-2003
   
   
  Links:

Label website:
  www.mantrarecordings.com
   
   
  Toolbox:

Print this article
   
   
  More on: Natacha Atlas

Union Chapel, London
  Live Review - 5-6-2003
   
N. Atlas: 'Something Dangerous' & beauty
Natacha Atlas: 'Something Dangerous'
(Mantra)
Natacha Atlas’s speaking in tongues


Gee, how sweet is the sound of beating rain counterbalanced by the delicious resonance of Natacha Atlas’s new album, ‘Something Dangerous’. (Not that the album doesn’t work in better climate, far from it, it just happens to be raining as we re-listen the album for the twentieth time in about a week.) It supplies whatever you need, a downtime, an adventure-in-sound, World music pop, pumping your body into shape via a spot-jogging or something more intimate (with someone else)…

Its title is certainly appropriate because it is a risky move to issue such an idiosyncratic album at the time of synthetic taste buds being satiated by processed music. Ms Atlas gets Middle Eastern music straight to the heart of current UK pop with infusion of dance, rap, drum’n’bass, R&B, soundtracks, French chansons and Hindi pop elements. Funk-rockingly fusionistic title track is succeeded by ‘Janamaan’ that combines bhangra-riffs with techno and Bollywood’s cine-pop.

Although more than accomplished vocalist, Altas is not threatened by competition and, for the first time, guest vocalists include Princess Julianna and soon-to-retire Sinead O’Connor; there are also guest-musicians, such as bass-supremo Jah Wobble and Egypt’s finest shaabi trumpet players, the late Sami El Babli. They all contribute to a mind-reeling diversity that stretches from the cinematic Arabia-meets-classical orchestration of the opener, ‘Adam’s Lullaby’, for which she teamed up with Jocelyn Pook (who scored the last Stanley Kubrick’s picture, ‘Eyes Wide Shot’) to end up sounding like Far-Eastern aria, if they were writing Western operas to Jamaican patois featuring on ‘Eye Of The Duck’, to lamenty ‘Just Like A Dream’, to R&B-meets-Arabiclub of ‘Simple Heart’ with O’Connor.

There is also an intriguing version of James Brown/Betty Newcombe’s classic ‘This Is a Man Man Man’s World’ that takes it jazzy-cum-crooning that is on the edge of decency, bass (courtesy Wobble) driven cosmic-tripper ‘This Realm’ and electro-pulsating other-reality beating ‘Like The Last Drop’, just like an Islamic Björk, actually. There is such a sense of internationalism here, this is truly World music, the planetary kind. Songs that incorporate elements of almost every sonic kind humans have ever come up with to create a record that ‘speaks’ in many a tongue… Only people unable to see how functioning culture can be founded on lies will not understand this album.

If we truly had a global radio network, this is one of the discs that would be the most fitting.

Overtly magnificent album.

9/10


SashaS
5-6-2003
Natacha Atlas’s album ‘Something Dangerous’ is released 19 May 2003 by Mantra Recordings