CD: Iness Mezel - Beyond the Trance

No, not “trance” in the sense of galloping four-to-the-floor electronic music made by people on Ecstasy for people on Ecstasy. This trance is the original ritualised half-conscious state produced by fast, intensely repetitive, rhythmic tribal music… OK, now I’m thinking about it, we are kind of on the same page here, you just have to appreciate that what this French/Italian/Algerian/Kabyle singer-songwriter is interested in is the spiritual origins of the braindead quantised noise favoured today by the average clubber.

She is aided and abetted on this, her third album, by sometime Robert Plant guitarist, Tinariwen producer and musician in his own right, Justin Adams. Justin likes a good blues or rock riff, and lays them on thick and opaque all over Iness’s haunting, hypnotic songs and it works surprisingly well. She’s a powerful open-throated vocalist and a versatile song writer, so despite Adams’s full-on production which weaves a maelstrom of pounding percussion, banjo, lute, kora and violin, it’s still the songs which remain strongest in the memory.

These songs include the admirably forthright “Amazone” which seems to be a manifesto for spiritual independence with its line, “I shall take the veil off, study, vote and exist”. But my personal favourite is “Strange Blues”, a slow, prowling atmospheric blues, finished off with exquisite arabesque detailing and cinematic atmospherics. Like all great songs any attempt to label it falls woefully short, but if you liked Flowers of Romance-era Public Image Ltd then this should also float your boat. Subject-wise it’s another curve ball in that it’s a tribute to journalists (yes, journalists) who risk their lives when reporting from the world’s trouble spots.

The next song up, “Tahkei’t” – with its gentle acoustic guitar and violin arrangement - makes one wonder what Joni Mitchell would have sounded like had she been born Algerian. So, yes, there’s much diversity in this wider definition of the word "trance". This is also a remarkably cohesive album given its stylistic diversity, and one I suspect will end up on my favourites list at the end the year.

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