Anas is a cheerful young man. You wouldn't even dream of him fleeing three years ago. He laughs at himself, is at peace with his life. The slim giant is the head of the Syrian band Khebez Dawle (pronounce: 'Kewess 'Daule). Her name means as much as bread from the state. The band's first CD, "Khebez Dawle", is not exciting because it has a refugee bonus, but because it combines moments of experimental and sometimes quite hard rock with Arabic music in a gripping and absolutely unusual way, without ever falling into the trap of any world music ecstasy.
The sound of two electric guitars, bass and drums sounds as strange as it sounds familiar. It's the same as most European and US rock bands, but the harmonies sound exotic and the Arabic vocals may seem alien at first. Khebez Dawle are Arabs, and yet their songs do not at all correspond to the popular ideas of oriental or middle eastern pop music. Singer and guitarist Anas calls it Rock Shaabi. The term Shaabi describes a kind of intellectual popularity, according to Anas "something intellectual a taxi driver in Damascus can listen to". For him it is a combination of western postrock and the scales with which the musicians grew up in Syria. "Normally oriental instruments are pressed into a western frame. We go the opposite way, using Western instruments, but also looking for the scales that the Oriental and Western worlds have in common. In the vocals and solos of the electric guitar we work a lot with quarter tones. This electric guitar sound makes up the character of the CD. Our guitarist Hekmat experiments a lot with these scales without using a fretless guitar. He's developed many tricks to make this possible."
The sound of Khebez Dawle is one thing, her story another. Khebez Dawle aren't the five guys who just plugged their guitars into their parents' garage. "We started under a different band name in Syria", Anas begins the story of his odyssey. "But all this came to an end before we had the chance to play even one of our songs live. Our drummer was an activist of the peaceful revolution, and our guitarist received his conscription. We lost control and didn't even know if we'd get away with it. Two of the remaining members went to Beirut at the beginning of 2013. I stayed near Damascus for the time being, put our songs online, and Khebez Dawle started. The situation in Syria became increasingly hopeless, and the peaceful revolution turned into a bloody civil war. No one knew anymore what he was fighting for and dying for. In April I followed the others to Beirut, and the online project became a real band again. We worked on the songs and it became a concept album about a young person who tells the situation in Syria without political considerations from a humanistic point of view. In the middle of 2013 our guitarist Bashar joined us, who had fled the army in the meantime. The album was recorded from the beginning of 2013 to mid-2015."
