Hanni El Khatib’s FLIGHT is ostensibly a dance album. It’s driven throughout by beats which recall the best of classic Detroit techno (one track’s title even doffs a cap to the city). But, at the same time, it’s oddly compressed and murky, with bass that trades clarity for lo-fi fogginess. This style is by no means bad—there’s intentionality to it. In the spirit of Liars’ Mess and T.F.C.F., this album has no floor—so the listening experience is frantic and anxiety-inducing, like struggling to stand up in the deep end of a pool.
Once acclimated to this production, you’ll be able to pick out little cracks of brightness, like the piano solo in pop banger ‘ALIVE’, or the tight snares that punctuate ‘STRESSY’. Such moments of hope enliven and enrich the album’s more fraught sections—and when FLIGHT opens out like this, it’s really gratifying to hear.
The anxiety is deepened by the album’s inability to settle—at just over half an hour, it manages to jam in over a dozen compositions, whose tones all veer wildly apart. The effect is a colourful collage of ideas that don’t really try to coalesce. This album doesn’t have one unifying statement of intent—it has about ten contradictory ones—but they all provide a thrill.
A real standout is ‘LEADER’, which works its theme into its composition with a call-and-response that sounds like Fear of Music-era Talking Heads. In fact, while they may not appear to share much DNA on the surface, Hanni El Khatib and David Byrne both reflect fairly similar aspects of the world in their work. Everything’s a coiled spring—tightly-wound and quietly aggressive. You feel, with FLIGHT, on the precipice of something that’s out of control; you’re at a party which is about to erupt into violence; watching a trapeze artist hang in the air, certain they’re about to fatll. But you know you’re going to watch, mesmerised, no matter how ugly things get.
FLIGHT is available for pre-order and streaming here.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe