7/10

The most interesting tension on 'Fire in the Master's House' is that Sheykh Forever rarely allows serious subject matter to dictate predictable music. Across fourteen tracks, Iraqi-born London musician Mostafa Al addresses displacement, propaganda, inherited trauma, survivor’s guilt and the consequences of war through a record filled with disco rhythms, funk, heavy rock, hypnagogic pop and abrasive electronics. The contrast creates this strange physical unease, where music is capable of making the body move while the lyrics repeatedly pull attention back towards loss.

Opener 'I'm Your History' establishes that approach immediately. Its focus on dispossession gives the album a clear political and emotional starting point, framing history as something attached to homes, families and individual memory. While 'Ghosts!' and 'Lineage (Where Is My Baby?)' continue that concern with what remains after violence has taken place, while 'Same Disease' turns towards the damage that can pass between generations.

His own fascination with funk and dance music means 'Fire in the Master's House' is rarely static in its progression. Songs move through warped pop structures, dense electronic grooves and heavier passages, with the influence of artists such as Blood Orange and the Bar-Kays providing useful reference points without fully explaining the record’s restless character.

Everything was written, performed, produced, mixed and mastered by the artist at home over four years, and that self-contained process gives the album a distinctive internal logic. Its stylistic changes can be abrupt, but they rarely feel arbitrary.

'Fire in the Master's House' is uneasy, occasionally confrontational and intentionally difficult to separate from its political concerns. But its most effective decision is also its simplest.

Sheykh Forever refuses to make suffering musically inert. The rhythm keeps moving even when the subject matter gives it every reason not to.