Nadine Khouri: “Carry on Pushing These Partitions” Observe Assessment

On her 2010 EP A Song to the City, the London-based singer-songwriter Nadine Khouri started untangling her troubled relationship with geography—particularly with Beirut, the town she and her household fled years earlier throughout Lebanon’s civil warfare. Since then, dislocation has been the throughline of Khouri’s work: Her 2017 debut album The Salted Air was written after she moved from New York to London, its ethereal people and rock preparations assuaging her sense of displacement. On “Carry on Pushing These Partitions,” the newest single from her upcoming album One other Life, Khouri addresses the late singer-songwriter Lhasa de Sela, who symbolizes music’s energy to floor the self and transcend borders: “Your voice, it might awake/A rising moon over Montreal cafés,” she sings, the phrases tumbling in opposition to a backdrop of starry guitar nodes and the generator-like hum of a Korg synthesizer. Working once more with John Parish—the Bristol producer identified for his work with PJ Harvey—Khouri sounds smokey and clever, her wealthy alto given house to shine amidst a fluttering drum machine, a twinkling Rhodes piano, a bass line like a velvet rug. “We traveled to this point, reworked/At the start of your voice,” she croons, by no means sounding extra at house.