Oori – Pharaoh’s Daughter (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

With still a month to go until Pharaoh’s Daughter drop their new album, Songs of Desire, they have kindly given us a single, a scintillating taste of what’s to come, in the form of the effervescent “Oori”, and it is safe to say that it should tide even the most impatient, discerning music fan over until that day comes.

Now, I may be someone who picks apart music and pulls at generic and stylistic threads for a living, but I’m out of my depth here. I am reliably informed that the band merges Hasidic chants, Mizrahi/Sephardi folk-rock, and Middle Eastern grooves with psychedelic, electronic, and baroque influences, and only the last three am I anything close to familiar with, but it feels like music carried down through the ages, so who am I to argue. But if you are looking for music that seems to build bridges between Middle Eastern spice and celebratory modern folk, timeless traditions and modern digital dexterity, the serene and the psychedelic, then “Oori” has everything you need.

As someone whose grasp of languages doesn’t run to, presumably, Hebrew, I am probably better positioned to talk about the musicality of the vocal melody than the words. I guess not being caught up in the meaning of the song, I can fully appreciate the vocals as another instrumental strand in the sonic mix rather than what it is actually saying. Even with the language barrier, for which I take full responsibility, I could listen to Basya Schechter‘s voice all day.

With the album to follow based on the poetry of the Song of Songs, this is music that has been traveling a long time, both adhering to tradition and evolving with the age. It is steeped in history and reverence, but still resonates resolutely today; it is the sound of ancient teaching, and past voices planting new roots in the modern age.

Bandcamp album pre-save