These are heavy times and DJ Haram knows it. “This world betrayed me,” muses the Brooklyn-based artist near the top of Beside Myself, her long-gestating debut album: “Nah I’ll never forgive this world for who it made me.” Two songs later, she spits with cold-hearted venom, “I see god and I can’t stand him.”
The album’s mood can be similarly severe. Beside Myself orbits around a hybrid of electronic sounds and Middle Eastern instrumentation that will be familiar to fans of Haram’s 2019 EP Grace. But the results are far darker and more varied, a gangland knife fight to Grace’s percussive tumble. “Lifelike” creeps by on ominous synth drone and piercing guitar feedback, the cramped mix offering no hope of reprieve, while “IDGAF” is a Vantablack amalgam of sludgy, metallic riffs, electronic claps, and darbuka drum patter, like a Syrian Black Sabbath. “Badass,” meanwhile, is a hard-edged playground chant—“Mama she a badass bitch/Mama don’t take no shit/Mama gonna get that switch/Mama gonna beat that bitch”—set to nebulous, claustrophobic percussion.
Beside Myself frequently sounds angry. But this is not a one-note record or simple cry of outrage. On many songs, Haram—a DJ with years of experience—uses cleverly layered beats to add depth to the sharply pointed rage, bringing a release of anarchic energy to the album’s furrowed brow. “Loneliness Epidemic” belies its somber title by lurching into motion like the first couple on a wedding dancefloor, ending up as a full-on Middle Eastern house banger. The electrifying “Sahel,” with Egyptian producer El Kontessa, is a breakbeat-versus-darbuka drum battle, rhythms slowing and accelerating at will, un-gridded and wild. And “Fishnets,” with Bbymutha, sha ray, and producer August Fanon, sets Saydah Ruz’s haunting violin against the kind of dustily swaggering beat that the RZA used to reserve for peak Ghostface. Haram has called her album “the antithesis to ‘joy is resistance’,” but it’s hard not to feel a hit of jubilation when the beats hit this heavy and free.
As the album’s cleverly ambiguous name suggests, Haram makes excellent use of her collaborators. Abdul Hakim Bilal’s guitar playing is beautifully emotive, while Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet adds a somber sense of ceremony to “Remaining.” On “Stenography,” Armand Hammer’s Elucid and billy woods are by turns acrobatically surreal and poetically evocative, while Haram’s 700 Bliss bandmate Moor Mother uses brutal repetition to brick a wall of words around the droning beat on “Lifelike.” But the album’s best verse might be from Haram herself, on “Distress Tolerance,” where she intones, “Every man thinks his problems are the biggest/It’s a funny coincidence /And I’m ’posed to be/Miss bubbly mistress.”
Playful but serious, clever but blunt, the verse speaks to the singular appeal of Haram’s debut album: Beside Myself is as twisted as life itself, an audacious mixture of Jersey club, rap, punk, heavy guitars, live percussion, and classical elegance, where anger, joy, and frustration come mushed up in tangles like classroom Play-Doh. Some of the record is jaw-droppingly inventive, whether the violin gabber of “Voyeur” or the sun-warped jungle flex of “Sahel.” But it is a mark of Haram’s vision that, through turbulence, she has created a musical universe where these anomalies can thrive. Beside Myself is dramatic and daring, the agreeably messy sound of the kind of radical freedom that might not change our sinking world but can liberate the willing mind.
