Blaakyum released a video for the oriental track they played back at the Byblos International Festival. The song has been played for a while now at Blaakyum’s concerts, but this is the first time we see it online. The track’s unofficial name is “Al Ain”, and incorporates riffs from the Lebanese song “Al Ain”.
Blaakyum pushed the track further into the oriental field by adding a “derbakeh” and “daff” to the song.
“When we composed The Land, we didn’t know what to expect, we wanted to see how people would react to having something oriental in our music, but not the typical Metal that usually relies almost completely on Keyboards to sound Oriental, like what most bands in the Middle East do. It was a very positive experience; both the local scene and the international scene liked it. Now we are trying one step further incorporating our most traditional Folk, not the Arabic Folk but the Levantian Folk, Dabbkeh, we came up with this. We wanted to do something both more Oriental yet more Heavy”, Bassem quotes.
Check out the track here:
Although the sound and video are of poor quality, as it is a collection of footage from different cameras (some are phone cameras), the music on this recording sounds pretty good. Moreover, the enthusiasm of the crowd is evident… I recall the crowd was on fire during that track, I even saw a “dabkeh” line form. The song ends by Bassem asking the crowd to mosh on the tunes of “The Last Stand”.
