Lambs to the Slutter

There’s a lot about Slutterhouse, Lebanon’s latest scene-stealing band, that doesn’t make a whole heap of sense. The duo don’t look like they would share the same postcode, never mind the same studio: the lead singer Rabih, or Mick, looks like the guitarist in a Faces covers band, with a mane of black curls flopping over Aviator sunglasses and a Biblical beard, while spiky-haired producer Nabil looks like he travels to work on a skateboard.

The pair don’t even live in the same country. Rabih, who grew up wanting to be Axl Rose, is polishing off a doctorate in philosophy at a prestigious Parisian university while Nabil remains in Beirut, skipping between various musical projects, one of which, Trash Inc, was responsible for the memorable “Punk Rock Bitch” that appeared on Playstation’s FIFA 2007.

Even the name is weird. It was, according to Rabih, the result of the girl Nabil was seeing back in 2006 playing around with Kurt Vonnegut’s cult novel Slaughterhouse 5 and the Doors “Roadhouse Blues”. It was first used to christen the pair’s maiden composition – a dirty techno-punk mash-up. All in all, there’s no way you would think their debut album Made in Dance, set to be released in early October, would be a collection
of crisp, intelligent electronica.

“Just don’t call us ‘underground’, please,” begs Rabih, down a phoneline from Paris. “I hate that term. It’s so elitist and self-defeating – I want everyone to hear our music! We’re overground, man!” Overground, possibly. But thankfully the burbling beats, icy synth washes and effects-laden vocals that cascade out of the speakers is anything but anodyne, corporate mainstream pop. The only sense this is Music for the Masses is that it isn’t a million miles from Depeche Mode’s 1985 album of that name, which combined dark, industrial textures with a sheen of synthesisers and Dave Gahan’s proto-gothic vocal.

But the resemblance is only fleeting; Slutterhouse is less grinding, less relentlessly grim, with pleasing melodies and buzzing chord progressions. More importantly, perhaps, they can’t ever sound like anything else because there’s little chance a band has ever been formed by such polar opposites. There was no studious design to this sound and, unlike the vast majority of new bands, certainly no conscious imitation of a shared musical obsession. In fact, Slutterhouse is the sound of LA cock-rock and knob-twiddling techno meeting in a head-on collision that leaves only two survivors – who then bond over the rhythmic bleeps of their respective life-support cardiographs. 
“I was looking for a singer for my electronic work,” says Nabil, “and when I started to get to know Rabih, I thought why not work together? And it has turned out pretty much as I hoped; a bit dark, a bit sleazy, a bit sci-fi, a bit 80s. And most importantly, people seem to really like it.”

“I was always a rocker,” says Rabih. “A cousin of mine introduced me to metal and classic rock when I was 8 or 9. From then on, I would go to school in a wig and torn jeans, just desperately wanting to be Axl Rose from Guns N Roses. In fact, there was a time when I genuinely thought I was him. When I was older, I thought I was Slash – the hair, probably – and I bought a guitar and started playing in bands in the local rock scene in Beirut.
“I guess we’re the bridge between the two worlds,” he adds. “We meet in the middle of our relative influences. He’s all electronica and synths while I’m rock, all Steve Tyler and Marc Bolan.”

“When I was in Paris, I started browsing through the Indiecult website, which is a kind of home for the Beiruti underground music scene,” Rabih says. “I met Nabil in some kind of forum and when I came back to Beirut, we became really close friends. We never really thought about collaborating musically, but at the end of the summer, as the bombs were falling, I headed for Dubai for five days to finish some university work. On the day I left, I picked up a guitar and took it to Nabil’s house with the idea of just recording a song to remember the summer.”

A couple of hours later, they had recorded their first song, “Slutterhouse Blues”. They started circulating the track and when faced with an avalanche of approval, they realised that they might have stumbled across something genuinely intriguing. They vowed to work together even after Rabih’s return to Paris, and although the track is a long way from their current output – all clashing beats and jagged edges of sound – the collaboration quickly settled into what has become their blueprint for electronic success: Rabih writes the words and carves out the melody lines, sometimes on the back of loops and samples developed by Nabil, who then works largely on his own to complete the production and mixing.

The songs are certainly universal, and could have been chiselled in any recording studio from Los Angeles to Latvia, with few clues to their origins. It was how Rabih wanted it, not seeking to create novelty value about the music and allowing it to speak for itself. It’s one of the reasons he goes by Mick; and even if the Middle East is at the core of many of the tracks, like “Inside the Station”, which was written at 3am in a Dubai hotel room as Israeli bombs were dropping on his home country, the polish is entirely European.

Their own release, Made in Dance, is being launched across the Middle East by Rabih’s London-based label Ringside Productions, which the pair regard as the best way to get the songs into the market before a major deal can be struck for Europe. Then it’s promotion time – with maybe even a NOX-inspired trip to Amman. Then, of course, the world. “We just want to make this happen,” Rabih smiles. “We’re ready for this.” 

A full version of this article appears in NOX36