“When I say my music sounds like knife-fight music it’s because I attach my songs to visuals quite a bit – I think of a fight scene and this is the music I think would be playing in the background,” he says.
“It’s tough describing my own music to others, because people’s perception varies so much. When I tell them I just make rock music, some of them will think I must sound like Tool, and others will think I mean Van Halen or somebody.” In fact, El Khatib’s sound couldn’t be farther from these bands, which almost justifies his long-winded definition as “a minimal, Americana, rock ‘n’ roll, garagey kind of sound.”
However you decide to categorise his genre, one thing is for sure, both his sound and image pay homage to 1950s and ’60s classic Americana, and he says that for him, this is because of the integrity of the era’s songwriting.
“I think music back then was very simple and straightforward, and I really like how honest the writing was. Lyrically it’s very simple and there’s not much fuss. Even though it may seem a bit standard and rigid sometimes, a lot of the recording techniques and sounds were super experimental and progressive. That’s the kind of stuff that interests me on a musical level.”
However, when recording his debut album, Will The Guns Come Out, he admits that he didn’t take the purist approach to engineering that most would have expected.
“I didn’t even record in analogue. These days, you get a lot of people making revivalist music with that classic funk and soul sound – they do everything to a tee and research everything to getting the original, authentic cables. But for me, recording is about trying to capture the spirit, mood and feeling you get from the performance instead of getting the technicalities right. I don’t have enough of my own equipment, money, or even knowhow to authentically replicate that stuff. For me, I take my influences, I’m inspired by them and then I just create whatever comes out.”
A first generation American son of Palestinian and Filipino immigrants, El Khatib hasn’t had the most conventional route into the music business. He was a skateboarder from a young age, and music was just a side project he pursued alongside working as a creative director at skateboard fashion label HUF. He says the decision to migrate from the skating world into music wasn’t a hard one, and there are attributes from his skating days he draws on when it comes to writing music.
“I struggled with the decision a bit in the beginning but I think the idea of being able to do my own thing and on my own terms was way more exciting. Designing skateboard graphics was fun, but travelling the world with your best friends and playing shows every night is way more intriguing.
“I grew up skateboarding, and there’s a very DIY mentality I took from it – when you want to do something, you just go ahead, do it, and get it done. Now skateboarding is a respected mainstream sport with tons of money involved in it, but back when I got into it, it was a weird, outcast thing to do. It was this attitude and rebellion that has shaped my whole outlook on the way I do things. Now that I’m older I can see where the mentality fits into life and makes sense. When I was young I was like ‘fuck everything!’, but now I’m a bit more conscious of what I can and can’t do.”
Will The Guns Come Out definitely captures this rebellion in its delivery and El Khatib says that this attitude is something the duo amplifies even more on stage.
“It’s just me and a drummer and it’s noisy, spontaneous and can get pretty crazy at times. It’s much heavier and wilder than the record but it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been playing with the same drummer forever and he’s been a good friend of mine since we were teenagers so we seem to have this rapport where we don’t really need to speak much.”
Because of the preconceptions that come with a drums and guitar duo, as well as El Khatib’s bluesy licks and grainy vocals, he inevitably finds himself being compared to bands such as The Black Keys and The White Stripes, however he says he doesn’t necessarily see this as a negative trait and doesn’t feel the need to break out of this shadow in any way.
“People are going to draw those comparisons because of our live setup and that’s cool because those guys obviously paved the way for people to accept that duos can go beyond just dark, underground bars – they play in front of tens of thousands of people. I think for me, it’s important I realise my music is quite different to theirs, even though the live setup might be the same.”
