New Music Revue: Yasmine Hamdan offers cathartic pleas for hope

Yasmine Hamdan
I remember I forget
(Crammed Discs)
4.5/5

To listen in length to an unfamiliar language is to become fluent in a spirit. When listening to Yasmine Hamdan’s latest album I remember I forget, I do just that—understand not the words but the distress, the devotion, the tenderness. She carries in her tune a cathartic plea for hope in her birthplace of Lebanon. It’s strung up by her vivid tonal shifts and held between meditative harmonies. 

The album recounts with unique potency a history of Lebanon—the 2020 Port of Beirut explosion, the economic collapse, the 2019 revolution. In this way, she is a narrator of crises that she detangles with patience. She performs a graceful act with radical vigor.

Opening track “Hon” and, later, the title track and “Mor” are resonant of traditional Arabic melodies and percussion, merging modern sound with persisting soul. I am warmly lulled by its nostalgia and revived by its newness.

Occasionally, she becomes playful in her rhythms and vocals. During “Shadia,” I am swaying, my limbs and hips thawed for movement. My head takes control for the sake of efficiency on the bus where I listen. The song is sweet and sincere and capable of transcending the fractured world. The distortion initially placed over her voice lends itself to a digital age, one where tragedy is perpetually recorded and viewed. 

In “Shmaali,” we hear this too—an electronic production meets Palestinian tarweeda, encrypted songs sung predominantly by women to communicate to loved ones dating back to the Ottoman Empire and into the British Mandate era. The juxtaposition frames the thrust of this album; indeed, today, in this age, there is continued suffering.

Hamdan treats her various themes with ardent attention—no sound found on I remember I forget was created in afterthought. She has wholly infused the richness of her history into the potential of today.