Omar Souleyman started out as a wedding singer in northeastern Syria and somehow ended up one of the most singular artists alive, and “Allishiryan” is exactly why. This is dabke run through a synth: the mijwiz and the rebab traded for a keyboard programmed to scream, a drum machine that never blinks, and that unmistakable raspy delivery riding on top of it all. It is fast in a way most electronic music is too polite to attempt. The rhythm just locks in and refuses to let go, and your only real options are to surrender or leave the room.
The thing I love is that none of this was built for a Western dance floor. Souleyman has reportedly cut hundreds of cassettes over the years, mostly recordings handed out at weddings, copied and passed around until they showed up in every dusty shop in the region. The festival circuit and the Four Tet record came later. The energy you hear in “Allishiryan” was forged at a party for actual humans, not engineered in a studio to test well in a playlist.
That is the whole point. Strip away the kaffiyeh and the sunglasses and the mythology and you are left with music that does one thing relentlessly well, which is make a room move. I put this on expecting novelty and got something closer to a sustained adrenaline drip. It does not build, it does not drop, it just goes, and forty years into doing this he still sounds like nobody else on earth. Turn it up loud enough to annoy a neighbor.