Nadah El Shazly is an extraordinarily talented Egyptian composer, singer, and producer with a long and fertile history of working with Montreal musicians like Sam Shalabi and Land of Kush, several of whom contributed to her sensational 2017 debut, Ahwar. Its somewhat surprising follow-up is Les Damnés ne pleurent pas (The Damned Don’t Cry), the soundtrack to Moroccan director Fyzal Boulifa’s 2022 film about the complex and turbulent relationship between an impoverished and marginalized mother and son in Morocco. El Shazly’s score has already been awarded the prize for Best Original Music from the Bordeaux Film Festival and a Dublin Critics Circle award for best score at the Dublin International Film Festival. Now it’s being released as a standalone recording, and it stands alone beautifully as an exquisite work of art quite separate from its role as a soundtrack. El Shazly returned to Montreal from her home base in Cairo to record once again with producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Land of Kush members Sarah Pagé on harp and electronics, and Jonah Fortune on double bass, as well as violinist Nicolas Royer-Artuso. She starts the album with improvisation, with the emotional and musical confusion of “Claustrophobic Love.” It takes on more structure as the story progresses, travelling through drama, chaos, and discordance on screen and on record before ending with the relatively benign and melodious closing tracks. Along the way Fortune’s bass, often played in such a high register that it sounds like a cello, creates an ominous foundation and a sandpaper counterpart to the icy, ethereal, mournful beauty of Pagé’s harp and Royer-Artuso’s sometimes droning, sometimes skittering, sometimes eerily rambunctious violin. But the standout in the middle is El Shazly’s vocal on “Adi,” a seven-minute-long performance of haunting, breathtaking beauty that makes Les Damnés ne pleurent pas unforgettable.
Mary Dickie is a Toronto music and arts journalist whose work has been published in a variety of different publications over the past couple of decades, including Impact, Eye Weekly, Maclean’s, ELLE Canada, The Toronto Sun, FASHION magazine and IN Toronto. She is also a member of the Polaris Music Prize jury.