Video: Hanni El Khatib, ‘Moonlight’

Kevin Bronson on February 8th, 2015

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Hanni El Khatib’s new album “Moonlight” furthers his rep as a rough-and-tumble rocker; it’s a perfectly imperfect collection of garage-blues that works up a heavy sweat yet doesn’t draw blood and inflicts some pain but no mortal wounds. “Knife-fighting music,” he called his work when his debut “Will the Guns Come Out” came out in 2011, and after a second-album dalliance with producer Dan Auerbach on 2013’s “Head in the Dirt,” his third album is comfortably raw-boned, sexy and menacing, although not lock-up-your-daughters dangerous. It’s also marketed well. The San Francisco-born songwriter doubles as art director for his label, the thriving Innovative Leisure, and in the interest of creating artifacts for future crate-diggers, there’s this: “A Visual Companion to the Album Moonlight,” available on (dramatic pause) VHS. Well, cassettes are apparently back, so why not? I spent a rainy afternoon “watching” the album Saturday, and it made for 42 minutes of wacky fun. The visuals are the work of Nathan “Nacho” Cabrera, who used found video clips to assemble a sprawling collage that’s synched to the music. It’s short-attention-span theater, to be sure, but as an object I wonder whether Dad will be pulling this off the shelf in the year 2035 to show the kids what 2015 was like. As it did for the anonymous souls who created the companion’s original visuals, obscurity knocks*.

||| Live: Hanni El Khatib opens for Dr. Dog on Friday at the Wiltern and Saturday and Sunday at the Glass House in Pomona.

||| Previously: “Moonlight,” Live at the El Rey, “Penny,” live at Coachella 2013, “Family”