Cheb Khaled & Safy Boutella ‎- 'Kutché' (Zone/EMI)

I don't know much about rai as a genre but thought this would be a good way to find out about it, as Cheb Khaled is one of those names I knew of, even if the actual sound was a mystery to me. And it's not common to find interesting records for sale in Latvia, so why not start investigating a genre with something that promises 100% of it? This is from '88 and you can hear it; the drums and synths are right out of MTV from the era, and the traditional Algerian instruments are sometimes hard to make out, or maybe even synth/MIDI versions. Khaled's voice soars over the songs, and he does this choppy/blocky thing sometimes that I like. The more sunshine-drenched tunes like 'El Lela' stick out a bit, because there's an openness and energy that overcomes the dated (to my ears) sound of the instrumentation. Khaled was the biggest of the big in this scene and I'm reading how he sold out later, but by the 1980s rai had already transmogrified into the modern pop music that this is. 'Chab Rassi' has a nice odd distance - its beat propels along like a ball on a hard floor, but there's a whirling flute line that answers Khaled's vocal line and it adds a nice woody assonance to the track. If there are ballads here, then it's a form of balladry I don't get, fast and bulbous; I don't understand the language anyway so it's hard for me to grasp the intent of any of these tracks. It's secular music, that's for sure, and overall it's slickly produced by Boutella, who gets a co-credit and largely handles arrangements and a bunch of instrumentation. There's some nice drum programming on 'Chebba' and a generally bouncy disposition to the whole record, but I really should investigate the rai from earlier decades, when it was genuinely the music of pariahs and rebels. 'Minuit', the closer, hints at that with some street field recordings of an accordion player bringing in the song before it erupts into the world pop confection that fits with the rest of the album. If rai is traditionally Dionysian music, like punk and rembetika, then by this point it had embraced the system pretty fully, I think. I'm not disappointed - though I rarely play this, it suits a certain summer mood, and listening to this provides some form of a escape, as I'm sure it's the closest that I'll ever get to Western Algeria.