Broad Ways

Album review

We have had to wait five years for Aufgang's new album. After the release of Turbulences in 2016, Rami Khalifé and Aymeric Westrich took time out to focus on solo projects. The world changed in the meantime, and so did the two halves of this Franco-Lebanese double-act. Their time away from the stage and the press allowed them to build Broad Ways, a sublime fourth work in which the band once again asserts what makes its music special: its refusal to be pinned down. 

Resolutely political, the album reflects the often paradoxical changes of our time. Thus, the two titles "R U Happy" and "Je vous aime", conceived as two antagonistic variations based around mental health, a subject that has been put back at the heart of public debates since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first, we find lockdown, malaise, madness and solitude, while the second tackles the themes of friendship and innocence. On another level, the group pays an elegant tribute to Lebanon—Rami's native land—with the track "Beirut", which sounds like something halfway between a cry of pain and a techno-club party, haunted by the ghost of the tragic explosion of August 2020. Other, more buoyant and childlike tracks celebrate the country and its gastronomy, such as the explicit 'Hummus' or 'Fallafel'. Two slow and very beautiful piano ballads complete this overview: 'Paper Planes' and 'Akuatica', on which connoisseurs of the band will recognise harmonic quotations from 'Rachael's Run' from a previous record, Istiklaliya.

Combining celebratory electro and mournful piano, the album is a magnificent concentration of the different styles explored by the group over the course of its history: we find the baroque, atonal experiments of Aufgang (2009), the rock and jazz accents of Istiklaliya (2013), and the Arabian pop and acid keyboards of Turbulences (2016). With Broad Ways, the duo has added a fourth gem to an already-unique discography. © Pierre Lamy/Qobuz