Hasan Nakhleh and his brother Rami describe themselves as stateless musicians. They are singer-songwriters from a village in the Golan Heights, the plateau in south-west Syria that has been occupied by Israel since it seized it during the six-day war in 1967. “I do not exist on the ID card … without a nationality, without borders,” as Hasan explains on the opening track Laissez Passer.
The brothers have created their own unlikely style, but their guitar-and-saxophone-backed songs of protest and dreams of escape are influenced more by reggae and the Tuareg desert blues of northern Mali than the music of Syria, the homeland they never knew. More Middle Eastern influences would have been welcome – as on Roots Rock Jabali, their tribute to the mountains of the Golan – but this is still an impressive set, thanks to the powerful and personal Arabic lyrics, for which, thankfully, a translation is provided.
