Handmade

Supplying the music for a big-budget TV ad campaign might provoke eat-ealls from the anti-corporate quarter, but the cash does buy the artist both time and freedom. Hindi Zahra is, up until now, best known for ‘Beautiful Tango’, a lazy, heat-hazed strum utilised by the marketing department of NFU Mutual, giving the Moroccan singer-songwriter the financial cushion to slowly craft this, her debut album. ‘Beautiful Tango’ is the obvious opener, trailing with it a string of easy-squeeze, high-summer ditties bathed in Parisian sunshine and Gitane smoke. But while the shallowest of listens might suggest just another Billie Holiday-influenced singer with torch songs not too troublesome for the coffee-table, when you scratch the surface a genuine depth is revealed. A Berber who moved to Paris in her early teens, Zahra’s ears have absorbed more than most: a varied soundtrack of traditional Berber styles and desert blues, through jazz, folk and reggae finds shelter on Handmade.

The mix is far from self-conscious and the joins are invisible. On ‘Stand Up’ pop-reggae gives way to a dizzying oud solo without the merest whiff of incongruity; the spiky desert blues guitars of ‘Kiss & Thrills’ shimmer handsomely. Handmade might essentially be a folk-pop album whose mainly English-language lyrics invite huge crossover success with open arms, but if this is the only way to hear the strains of North Africa in the CD racks of the nation’s supermarkets, we should all be in favour. Handmade is a persuasive opening gambit.