Siphr

Siphr (Zero) is the first studio album by the Lebanese-American musician, artist and educator Naima Shalhoub. With playing and writing collaboration throughout by Palestinian-American Tarik Kazaleh (aka Excentrik), across nine tracks the album imbibes from Arabic and Western styles in various ways and with varying degrees of success. There are a couple of pleasant lo-fi pop-ish numbers, an acoustic track with darbuka and frame drums, and a rather clichéd country blues, sung in Arabic.

Things look up elsewhere, though. ‘Six (Distraction Suite)’ starts with Marcus Shelby playing a busy double bass over which Shalhoub sings a kind of unrestrained, scat vocal. It turns into a electric piano-driven soul sound before coming back to how it started. The album also begins and ends with an intriguing, percussion-driven, wordless trance, that sounds both familiar and mysterious at the same time. Ultimately, this album works better in those moments when they are creating something totally new rather than when consciously combining its disparate elements. Despite this occasional lack of coherence, the best moments are genuinely inventive and make Naima Shalhoub a name to watch out for.