Mashrou3 Leila ponder world conquest, starting with Beirut

29 July 2011

BEIRUT: Mashrou3 Leila are excited. Sitting in their new studio in Beirut’s Sioufi district, the band’s lead vocalist Hamid Sinno, and guitarist Andre Chedid are discussing their scheduled Friday night concert to mark the release of their new EP at the Beirut Hippodrome. “It might just be the best concert,” says Chedid.

“If a lot of people show up, I think it’s going to be a great party,” agrees Sinno.

“El Hal Romancy” is the band’s second record since their eponymous 2009 album worked its way into the hearts of Beirut’s younger generation, eager for homegrown alternative music.

Containing six songs written over the course of a year, the EP is a development, rather than a shift in direction.

“A lot of the songs were written toward the end of the last album,” Chedid says, adding: “So it’s still the same kind of atmosphere.”

Although it is released on CD this week, the EP was made available for free download a week ago.

“People were going to pirate it anyway,” says Chedid. “This way whoever wants can pay what they want.”

It was a move made easier by the fact that the band remains unsigned, having yet to find a label that chimes with their outlook.

“Labels in the region have a very typical format,” says Chedid.

“It would be a lot easier and we would spend more time being creative, if we had a label,” says Sinno.

“But it’s not something we’ll compromise about.”

The band has had a similar experience with producers.

“People that are successful and available in the region are the people that produce pop stars,” says Sinno. “They’re not used to our approach, the way we write and everything.”

Having used a production house and recorded in a studio on the first record, the band decided to go it alone on “El Hal Romancy.”

“We weren’t really involved with how the sounds on [“Mashrou3 Leila”] were produced,” says Sinno. “It was a lot colder [than the new record.] Everyone would do their part and just leave.”

With no restrictions, the band took advantage of the opportunity to experiment – recording at various sites, including the experimental theater in the International Fairground in Tripoli, designed by famed Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, where they installed a microphone in order to achieve organic reverb.

“We recorded things in the bathroom,” says Sinno.

“We played with typewriters.”

The effect is a richer and more purposeful sound than the first album.

“The first album was a natural extension of where we were then,” says Sinno, the band’s lyricist. “We were writing a lot more about Beirut and politics and society. We were more critical, even arrogantly, which was actually a bit of a turn-off.”

If the band felt they had a point to prove on the first album, it seems now they are finding it easier to explore a more personal side.

“I think with the new writing we were actively trying to avoid writing about politics,” Sinno says. “It got old.”

It was the band’s early ideals, in part, that led to the decision to sing solely in Arabic.

“It was borderline ideological for us in the beginning to sing in Arabic,” says Sinno, who says he’s more comfortable speaking in English.

The Lebanese musical landscape that Sinno recollects when the band first started out at the American University of Beirut in 2008 was starved of Arabic content and the want of Arabic-language alternative music was one of the things that brought Mashrou3 Leila together.

“I knew one band that was writing in Arabic before us and that was Soap Kills,” Sinno recalls. “I’d turn the radio on … and everything on the Arabic stations was all the same, very formulaic. It made no sense to me.”

Sinno and Chedid both believe this is beginning to change, and there’s a case to be made that Mashrou3 Leila’s arrival left a trail which other bands have since traveled. For a country that was supposedly unused to seeing bands like Mashrou3 Leila, Lebanon has welcomed them with open arms. Last year saw them become the first Lebanese act to headline at the Byblos International Festival.

“We didn’t expect this [kind of reaction] at all,” says Sinno of their success. It was their concert in Cairo, this May, that made them realize how far they had come.

“Cairo was insane,” says Sinno. “It was the first time we’d played a huge concert in our own right … all these people were showing up and they knew our names and our faces and our lyrics. And that was great.”

The next step is the world. The band played their first European concert earlier this month, when they attended Serbia’s EXIT festival.

“Playing to an audience like that is really different,” says Chedid.

“You need to try and figure out what their reaction is without things as simple as facial expressions [to go by],” says Sinno.

Next up are concerts in Amsterdam, Canada and New York. Still, Sinno says he’s more interested in writing songs, than following hype.

“We have no big plans,” he says. “We just know we don’t want to stay here.”

Ambitions aside, the prospect of playing Friday night to those who have been with them right from the start is something the band relishes.

“We’ve been playing very tightly lately,” says Sinno. “There’s obviously going to be a few f**k ups, but we hope people won’t mind.”