Classic Album Review: Transglobal Underground - Psychic Karaoke (1996)

Craig Stephen revisits a lost classic …

It’s the mid-90s, and the British and international media are all over the phenomenon that has been labelled Britpop. Oasis and Blur have battled for the number one spot, Pulp are unlikely glam stars, and any band with a guitar and a love of The Beatles are being played ad nauseum on mainstream radio.

What chance has a band like Transglobal Underground got?

Playing diverse sounds from South London to South Asia in a variety of languages, they can’t be dubbed “retro opportunists”. That may have been too much of a challenge for the music critics of the time.

In the midst of this Britpop banality, Psychic Karaoke was released and was easily one of the albums of its year. It shouted at the Britpop bands and their media lackeys: “this is the future”.

I picked up the album on sale in Auckland and played it a little in the City of Sails before heading to Fiji. On a relatively remote island group it was on a regular spin cycle as it served as the perfect soundtrack to a country full of culture, friendly people, pristine beaches and palm trees. 

Psychic Karaoke, TGU’s fourth album, released on Nation Records and entirely self-produced, evokes visions of the Middle East and India with electronic rhythms and atmospherics.

It serves up cinematic textures and global grooves, mixing dance-friendly exotica, that utilised tablas, dhols, ouds, and djembe as well as guitar, violin/viola and cello. It features the magnificent voice of Egyptian-Belgian superstar Natacha Atlas and British-Asian singer Nawazish Ali Khan.

Hip-hop, dub, electronica, pop, and art rock are all here - and more.

The seven-minute ‘Chariot’ is the entry point to Psychic Karaoke. It’s a magnificent, meandering track featuring Middle Eastern percussion, a string section and breakbeats. It’s not until the three minute mark that Atlas comes in, working in tandem with an English language pseudo rap. It sounds like there’s far too much going on here, but it works and the instruments add an extra exotic element.

Atlas performs on half of the 12 tracks, a favourable number as she had released her debut solo album Diaspora the year before and her solo projects have significantly diminished her ability to record with TGU, and the various other artists she has collaborated with.

One of the tracks she doesn’t appear on is ‘Scully’ towards the end of the album. Instead, TGU’s Neil Sparkes takes on vocal duties and has a style similar to Barry Adamson, which is uncanny as part of one line is “Something wicked this way comes”, which happens to be the title of a track from Adamson’s Oedipus Schmoedipus album released the year before. It may well be a homage to the Mancunian singer, but they are very different songs.

Transglobal Underground have released many albums since 1996, all exploring different musical elements, cultures and genres. Some have worked and some haven’t but respect is due to a band that works outside the box.

Album Review: Natacha Atlas - Strange Days (2019)

Craig Stephen steps beyond the blog’s comfort zone to share some thoughts on Natacha Atlas’s latest album …

Strange Days: now wasn’t that an album by The Doors?

Indeed it was, and you can but wonder if Atlas was referencing the title of Morrison et al’s second album when she set off on her latest musical journey. But these are far stranger times than the world was in 1967, where the summer of love was a sweet memory by the time The Doors’ second album came out, and the two words have almost become a byword for a world in which populism and environmental destruction are now part of the lexicon. 

Atlas has a fascinating background, where East meets West: British and Egyptian parents and being brought up in Belgium. She is multilingual, and crucially multi-talented, with stints in Transglobal Underground and Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart.

For her 15^th solo work - a double album - Atlas dips into jazz and maintains her background in Middle Eastern music.

 The first time I heard Atlas as a solo artist was on an EP covering the James Bond film theme ‘You Only Live Twice’, giving it a whole new dimension. So it seems appropriate that Atlas here returns to the 60s and another notable item from the era: James Brown’s ‘It’s A Man’s World’. It’s fitting that such a song has a feminine voice to give it credence, and Atlas’s version supplies that first-party emphasis.

On an album sung in both English and Arabic, the opening track, ‘Out of Time’, mixes the two, breaking with the universal tongue but, after some jazz-style solo play, Atlas switches to her father’s vernacular to immense effect. As the song segues into ‘Maktoub’ Atlas now fully focuses on Arabic, which she has always made sound equivocal.

Soul star Joss Stone appears on ‘Words of a King’ - which was released as a single - and this is likely to attract diverging opinions for fans of both artists. From the point of view of this writer it lacks the poise of the album and is a humdrum exoteric duet in which the voices complement each other but don’t have the spark that’s required for a truly great team-up.

The man very much involved in this work is Samy Bishai, who as well as claiming co-composer credits for much of the material here, arranged all the music. Utilising a string quartet and a jazz quintet, Bishai creates a sound world in tune with Atlas’s unique delivery and delicate tonal inflections. This is obvious on ‘Lost Revolutions’ at the end of side three, a truly monumental atmospheric track with the singer at her most haunting as she laments the general failure of the Arab Spring, and in particular the one in Egypt where hope has now mutated into fear and repression.

As the title suggests, it’s an album that’s never quite what it appears and contains plenty of mystery. The music is gentle and intimate, yet highly charged with emotion, melding disparate musical elements from Western and Middle Eastern influences. It may not appeal to the jazz or world music purist but this is an album that essentially transcends labels and is a great example of fusion.