Roy Jurgens on November 17th, 2017

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Yasmine Hamdan is the personification of indie cool, Arab edition. Her brand of Arabesque trip-hop broods with atmosphere, winking with dark humor and accompanied with plenty of serpentine hip gyrations. While Tuesday’s show at the El Rey could have been better attended, the crowd was treated to a 90-minute set that smoldered aplenty but never outright burned.

She sang in Arabic (but spoke flawless English between songs), and although her stirring lyrics had very little literal effect on much of the crowd, she was able to skillfully emote in a way that transcended mere language. Backed by a three-piece band comprised of guitar, keys/samples and drums, there was a sparseness to the arrangements that gave her plenty of room in which to weave her sultry vocals. To the purist, the organic traditional flavors of doumbeks and ouds are missed, but to Hamdan these omissions are more out of an embrace of the future than a rejection of tradition. She is most definitely an Arab singer, yet breaking out from the cage of “world music” to create an exiting new sound out of a genre that has grown somewhat staid and rote with gloss and overproduction.

Hamdan’s arresting cameo in Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 vampire romance “Only Lovers Left Alive” brought her to a larger audience, and her performance of the song “Hal” from that film was bloody delicious. She reinvented Omar El Zenni’s standard 1940s serenade, “Beirut,” a song of karma. Her latest single, “Balad,” is a pulsing political damnation of daily life in Beirut. The title track “Al Jamilat” is a sly and playful take on manipulation.

Now a denizen of Paris, the songstress has made a name for herself by thumbing her nose at conventional Arab pop. The Beirut-born fortysomething emerged some two decades ago, fronting the seminal Lebanese trip-hop duo Soapkills. Following several releases with Soapkills she moved to Paris where there were collaborations with the likes of CocoRosie, Mirwais (part of Madonna’s camp) and Marc Collin (Nouvelle Vague) where she continued to hone her sound, leading to her solo releases Ya Nass in 2013 and the sublime Al Jamilat, released earlier the year.

Hamdan is in the midst of finishing up a brief North American tour before heading back to Europe. That said, Tuesday night’s glowing set laid the groundwork for a repeat performance in the coming year.