Uncovered, the second full-length release from Al-Qasar, is a retro-futurist reverie steeped in Arab folk and laced with the circuitry of Western psychedelic rock. A record that binds together four radically reimagined covers and three originals into an ecstatic tapestry where languages tangle, instruments cross-pollinate, and temporalities collapse. Rest assured, it’s also a banger. Not coincidentally, Al-Qasar will be performing in Bucharest at Contrul Club as part of the DokStation Music Documentary Film Festival on Thursday, May 29.
Formed by producer and composer Thomas Attar Bellier in Paris’s diasporic crucible, the Barbès district, Al-Qasar bills itself as an “Arabian fuzz” collective. A polymorphic organism, grafting Arab and Amazigh modes onto the skeleton of psych rock and animating it with contemporary street musics: chaabi, raï, dub, and protest chants. Think Omar Souleyman riding a Hawkwind through the deep Sahara. The band's previous album, Who Are We?, laid the groundwork for this maximalist approach, but Uncovered is bolder, weirder, and more structurally radical in its unmasking of cultural imperialism and aesthetic taxonomy. Through multiple languages and guests from nine countries, the record asks what it means to speak through others’ voices, and travel without appropriation. These are uneasy questions, but Al-Qasar doesn’t dodge them.
Take “Kişisel İsa,” the album’s Depeche Mode cover. The original’s sulky synth-pop textures are sublimated into something feral. The riff is rendered on electric saz, the rhythm section locked in a skittering Maghrebi groove, and Turkish vocalist Sibel delivers Martin Gore’s lyrics with a blend of seduction and disillusionment. By rerouting a canonical Western anthem through the sonic vocabulary of Anatolian psych and re-languaging it into Turkish, Al-Qasar unseats its cultural reference points.
This logic continues across Uncovered. “Ssir w ztam,” a deliriously reworked take on Sean Paul’s “Get Busy,” finds Moroccan vocalist Sami Galbi reimagining the dancehall club hit as a transcontinental street anthem. Layered with North African percussion and chaabi-informed vocal delivery, the track thrashes its way toward a thesis on postcolonial hybridity.
Where the covers act as traps baited with familiarity but sprung with subversion, the originals double down on ideological charge. “Promises,” featuring the Malian Mamani Keita and the ageless Cheick Tidiane Seck, is a lacerating piece of Afro-futurist psych, built on cyclical grooves and molten organ lines. Sung in Bambara, the lyrics aim at political betrayal and leaders who traffic in hope only to abandon their people. There’s a memory of Fela, Can, griots, prophets, and punk kids somewhere inside. Keita’s voice cuts across the grime, while Seck howls through the margins. The track calls out broken political oaths, but refuses despair.
But Uncovered's spiritual and structural unruliness also evokes the work of Sun City Girls, whose decades-spanning catalog of incantatory psych and anti-imperialist critique positioned them as provocateurs of a radical global unconscious. Like the Bishop brothers, Al-Qasar operates with a reverence for cultural material that is never neutered by politeness. Both bands practice a necromancy where clarity is always one fuzz pedal away from collapse.
“Desse Barama,” meanwhile, is more incantatory than confrontational. Originally a Nubian peace song by Hamza El Din, it is resurrected by Sudanese-American singer Alsarah. The arrangement leans dubwise, but at its core is a tension between serenity and rupture. Alsarah’s delivery is unhurried, devotional, and the instrumentation orbits her voice like relics in zero gravity. This tension makes it one of the album’s most devastating moments.
Elsewhere, “Blue Tataouine” lurches into full sci-fi terrain. Its title nods to the southern Tunisian town of Tataouine and the Star Wars franchise it allegedly inspired. However, the more apt reference might be to the cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose desert metaphysics and flamboyant ritualism resonate with Al-Qasar’s mystical yet barbed vision. Like a sonic El Topo, “Blue Tataouine” drifts through dunes, shimmering with mirage. At the track’s center is Tunisian oud virtuoso Nada Mahmoud, who's playing defies the typical folkloric positioning of the instrument.
The final track, “Bissaha Tlaqayna,” is the most emotionally complex. A reimagining of Wadih El Safi’s ballad, it is delivered here by Tunisian sufi vocalist Mariam Hamrouni, and the whole track gradually accumulates into a dense storm of echo and feedback.
If the album has an argument, the past is not a static archive, and the future is not a clean slate. Uncovered does not aim for purity or resolution. It revels in the feedback loop between ancestral knowledge and modern urgency. What Al-Qasar have accomplished here is a dispatch from a world already in motion.
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