Alan Bishop has always been a musical omnivore. He spent 26 years mining a myriad of global sources with his legendary trio Sun City Girls; under the solo moniker Alvarius B., he's covered songs from Bond films and rewritten Bob Dylan lyrics; as the proprietor of Sublime Frequencies, he's rescued lost sounds from every corner of the earth. So it's logical that his new group, the Invisible Hands, has a non-Western bent: everyone in the
group besides Bishop is from Cairo, where their self-titled debut album was recorded twice, once with English lyrics and another time in Arabic for a version
exclusive to the Middle East.
But there's Western stuff happening in Invisible Hands' music, which delves often into carefully-crafted psych and folk. "Soma" is the album's catchiest
track, a bouncy melody accented by backing vocals and sweet strings that are nearly
Beatles
-esque. Bishop doesn't like to let a happy sound go unchallenged, though, and here he undercuts the joy with lyrics about eyes being slashed and skulls
pummeled into "crushed ice." But even he succumbs to the beauty, filling "Soma"'s second half with aching violins and gentle acoustic guitars, both of
which sound like they could continue long after the tape stops rolling.
Out 3/19
Hear "Soma" here.