It takes some guts to form a band with only two persons, without any bass or anything else, just a guitar and a drum set, but the formula works in its glorious rawness. Hanni El Khatib brought his sexy garage rock infused with a sonic dash of the 50s on Thursday night during the ‘Also I like to Rock’ series organized by KCRW and Buzzbands LA at the Hammer Museum.
With Nicky Fleming-Yaryan behind the drums making these concrete dry beats, Hanni El Khatib, dressed in black as usual and wearing a sort of Mohawk-ish haircut, was consistently getting a distorted thunderstorm out of his guitar, that he was playing the same way he would have driven a motorcycle, with violent starts and abrupt interruptions, repeatedly crashing against a wall but still going fast.
From his blues-fueled songs such as ‘Garbage City’, ‘Loved One’, ‘Fuck it’, ‘Build Destroy Rebuild’, to his now famous cover of ‘You Rascal you’ and his new take on the Funkadelic’s song ‘I Got A Thing’ (who got recently chosen for Nike’s Just Do It campaign), he made everything sound dangerous and visceral with his bad ass and direct delivery.
He was using two microphones, one regular and another cooper one with an old-fashioned look, which was making his voice fuzzier and more distant.
It was the third time I was seeing them, but the first time they were actually visible and not performing in a semi-darkness of a club where they ordinarily play, and it was even more interesting to be able to observe the stage presence fitting well with the brutal derailing-train style of the music.
After a few violent songs, there was a softer slow-down-doo-wop moment with ‘Dead Wrong’ and its wow-ooo-oos chorus, and they also played a new song they haven’t recorded yet but have only played live, which had a lot of these 60s beats, but was still ready to do some damages at each guitar-drum riff.
Hanni El Khatib’s upcoming album ‘Will the Guns Come Out’ is scheduled to be released this September.