Hanni El Khatib - I Got A Thing

There’s short and sweet, and then there’s a two-minute dead running length. The only other single as short as Hanni El Khatib’s ‘I Got A Thing’ that springs readily to mind is Sonic Youth’s ‘100%’, and even that outlasts the former by a good thirty seconds. The reason for its length is perhaps explained by Hanni’s background, a “cocktail of skateboarding [and] punk rock”; there won’t be anyone who’s heard a Shinobu record that needs reminding that on the current US punk scene, brevity is a virtue.

Despite being a Funkadelic cover, this version owes its guitar tone more to Wolfmother, its attitude to the MC5, and its vocals to West Coast punk; the slightly-out-of-phase gang vocals in the chorus could be any number of bands on the Asian Man roster. Nevertheless, there’s still a lilt to the track that recalls the original, reinforcing the idea of this as a reverent reworking rather than some sort of gaudy pastiche.