Omar Khorshid

★★★★ With Love

WEWANTSOUNDS. LP

Highly collectible twangy Arabic exotica from the ill-fated Egyptian guitar maverick.

Omar Khorshid’s work with beat group Les Petits Chats and superstar divas Oum Kalthoum and Farid El Atrache made him a legendary figure in Arabic pop. The sometime silver screen star’s pioneering east/ west fusions and innovative fuzzed-up arrangements on 1978’s With Love witness his superfast fingers wreaking trebly magic on echo-deep, acid-fried cover versions of Mohamed Abdel Wahab’s Ahwak, El-Atrache’s Hebbina Hebbina (an Eno fave) and Rahbani Brothers’ Rahbaniyat. Elsewhere, the bent and twisted melodies and twitching traditional rhythms of Habibati and Zorba are pierced with pitch-bending, outer-space synth gurgles as they lurch from slow waltz to joyous jig. It’s arresting proof that Khorshid’s romantic mix of Link Wray, Dick Dale and Ennio Morricone’s six-stringer Bruno Battisti D’Amario could have taken him anywhere, had he not become fatally embroiled in Egypt’s turbulent politics.