Live review: Flamingods at The Music Room Dubai

Amid the predominance of rock and metal on the UAE’s live music scene, Flamingods’s Dubai debut was already an event, the dancefloor crammed with jigging hipsters long before a note was played.

Flamingods, an experimental band with several members who live in Dubai, Britain and Bahrain, perform live at The Music Room, Majestic Hotel Tower. Jeffrey E Biteng / The National
Powered by automated translation

Flamingods’s music really shouldn’t work live. The five members of this psychedelic indie-world collective were never once in the same room during the recording of breakout LP Hyperborea. Swapping files electronically between Britain and Bahrain, the result was a beguilingly beautiful haze of rhythms, tones and drones, employing weird ethnic music samples dug up online alongside exotic instruments picked up on founder Kamal Rasool’s travels, most notably a Turkish qanun.

Live, the band's music is harsher, less ambient, more tribal and trance-like – gone are many of the weirder instruments, in place, more layers of driving percussion. Fresh from a summer tour of Europe, the band have honed their onstage performance as a communal freak out.

Garnering rave reviews for Hyperborea, released in July, there's a critical mass swelling around Flamingods in the UK press – but what few people realised before now is that two members, including founder Kamal, live in Dubai. Despite that, Flamingods (named after the pink bird, not the red fire) had never played live in the UAE before four of the five took to The Music Room's stage Thursday night, dressed in flowing tie-dyed robes and tribal headgear, amid trinkets and charms, like a band of 21st Century hippies.

Swapping instruments readily, the quartet conjured a thick kaleidoscope of swirling samples, droning guitar lines and euphoric Eastern-influenced chanting over a flatbed of manic drums and percussion, lurching from African rhythms to jungle in the space of a few bars.

It’s this rhythmic drive which is key to their music – at one point all the members crowd around a single drum kit for a show-stopping percussive showdown – and with little harmonic change and lots of single-chord drones, the overall affect is desert blues in Technicolor; Tinariwen-meets-Animal Collective. And that’s why their music works – it sounds both box-fresh, and as old as the desert it was made in.

Amid the predominance of rock and metal on the UAE’s live music scene, Flamingods’s Dubai debut was already an event, the dancefloor crammed with jigging hipsters long before a note was played. But these guys didn’t disappoint – the audience left blissed-out and bewildered by the sound of something genuinely new on these shores. What’s more, we can now, kind-of, claim them as ours.

“There needs to be more live music in Dubai,” announces Kamal from the stage, warming up for an encore. “We encourage every one of you to pick up an instrument.”

A statement as idealistic, collectivist and utopian as their music, here’s hoping these guys can help kickstart something new on our scene.

rgarratt@thenational.ae