The Best of Soapkills

In 2009 I spent a week in Beirut lecturing on music journalism and asked each of my students to bring into the classroom a record that they felt represented the best of contemporary Lebanese music. Almost every one of them turned to the same band and my desk was piled high with copies of the three albums recorded between 2001 and 2005 by Soapkills. By then the band had already broken up, following lead singer Yasmine Hamdan's move to Paris. Yet to this day they remain the touchstone by which every Lebanese band is judged. Heavily influenced by dub, house music and the late-90s trip-hop sound of Massive Attack and Portishead, the duo took classical Arabic song and retooled it for the 21st century, with Hamdan's beguiling voice underpinned by skittering beats, dubby echoes and hypnotically throbbing bass lines. If the idea was simple enough, they carried it off with an innovative flair and imagination: whereas so much Arabic electronica sounds shoddy and kitsch, Soapkills sounded majestically assured. At the time their music got little or no attention outside the Middle East and the Maghreb. This compilation offers a belated but welcome chance for the rest of the world to catch up.