After years of conjuring pioneering sounds, Cherine Amr wants to have a different kind of fun.
This means ditching the foreboding heavy metal of her group Massive Scar Era to embrace a more genteel sonic territory for her solo music under the name Cheen.
A new album released last week under the Dubai label Universal Music Mena, Esmi (My Name) marks the beginning of Amr's solo career. It also heralds a significant departure from her work with a band, which at the peak of its popularity, was one of the most controversial groups in Egypt.
The grinding guitar riffs, squalling violins and pummelling rhythms of MSE are absent in Esmi . They are replaced, instead, by a plaintive sound mixing alternative rock with burbling electronic beats.
The most interesting feature, however, is Amr's voice. Clear and measured, it is refreshing to hear her vocals up front, as opposed to when they were fighting to be heard on top of the brute sounds of the group.
"That is definitely a new thing for me. It took me a while to adjust to that alone," Amr tells The National from Vancouver, a city she has called home for the past five years.
"While recording this song I realised how it was easier for me to sing at the top of my voice, because that is what I have been doing for the past 15 years. It was fun and emotional. Now I am enjoying discovering new depths to my voice. In Esmi, for example, I never knew my voice could reach so low. It's good to show that I can do more than just scream."
The trials and tunes of Massive Scar Era
Amr needed to move on creatively from MSE, at least for a while. While the band is still active, you get the sense Amr is happy calling her own creative shots at the moment.
A lot of her tension lies in how the group’s story began to eclipse the innovative music it was producing. Formed in 2005 in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria with co-vocalist and violin player Nancy Mounir (bassist Dylan Wijdenes-Charles joined in 2017), the band caused a stir with their abrasive sounds.
Taking their cues from thrash metal monsters Metallica rather than Egyptian pop darling Mohamed Mounir, the group announced themselves through a string of EPs including their 2006 debut Incarnation and 2012's Comes Around You, then there is their Gothic video Pray.
While the band found international acclaim abroad, with appearances at heavy metal festivals across Europe, the provocative sounds proved too controversial at home. The constant criticism and threats of violence from extremists forced Amr to relocate to Canada in 2015.
As well as the anguish of leaving her homeland – she returned last year to visit family and friends. What remains a sore point is the way some segments of the non-Arab media viewed the group, which she thinks was less as artists but more a pawn to push a stereotypical narrative of the Middle East.
"Look, when the group first started there were no female bands performing. So to see young girls inspired to pick up the guitar after watching us or going with their mothers to see our shows is something that we are proud about," Amr says. "But that was back in 2005, to be discussing the same-things 15 years later is a problem."
The controversy lead to an internal crisis for Amr: “It caused me huge identity issues, which I am still dealing with,” she says.
"I do not identify myself as an Arab, but more as an Egyptian with north and some west African roots. It's a way to defend myself from being stereotyped because I have seen this whole notion of Pan-Arabism used by the West as a way to bundle us all together, instead of viewing the region as having many different cultures and traditions."
'Esmi' is the gateway to a new sound
That struggle for identity also bled into the creative sphere. The melodicism of Esmi has always been within Amr, but she struggled to channel those ideas into MSE.
“The way that we worked was within the metal framework and some of these poppy songs that I would write just would not fit,” she says. “I mean, we tried. I would come up with a song that we loved and then we would turn it into a metal song, instead of keeping it simple and quiet.”
With a few more tracks to be released under her alter ego Cheen, Amr seems to have finally found that creative outlet she longed for.
This may also mean that she will be more ready to return and howl away when MSE get back to the studio in the near future. But until then, Amr is content to keep it low-key and let her songs, for once, do the talking.
“There are people who know my story and they will always be special,” she says. “And then there will be others who would hear this song and just enjoy it for what it is. If they say it sounds pretty and that's it, then I have absolutely no problem with that. As long as the work connects with people, I am happy.”
