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Citizen Boris

(JDub; US: 10 Feb 2009; UK: 10 Feb 2009)

It’s an increasingly familiar technique: take some traditional form of music, crank up the volume, and season with snarling punk rock intensity. What the Pogues did with Celtic balladry, O’Death does with Appalachian hillbilly bluegrass, and Hank Williams III does with his grandfather’s flinty country music, the Brooklyn-based group Golem does with that old-time Hebrew sound. To their credit, they stir up a considerably more jumbled concoction than the aforementioned bands. Incorporating Romany folk, accordion-driven klezmer songcraft, and bits of Russian dance-pop, they spit and belt their lyrics in a semi-coherent mix of Yiddish, English and various Slavic languages. (Lead singer Annette Ezekiel seems to be at least septa-lingual.) Their breakneck delivery ends up sounding less like Israel than New York City, or more specifically Brighton Beach—an atavistic, self-segregated and yet diverse corner of the melting pot.

I’ve never seen Golem perform, but based on their albums, I’d wager they put on a hell of a show. Their combination of manic wildness and instrumental density is compelling, and their Jewish/Euro-folk salad approach provides a wide enough variety of moves and textures to keep you guessing. Still, as with many of the bands that use the old folk/punk dialectic, they suffer from being pressed onto compact disc. While live performance favors musicianship, attitude and theatrics, records demand a level of songwriting that Golem can’t quite deliver.

Which is not to say that their new album, Citizen Boris, is entirely free of hummable tunes. “Train Across Ukraine” rides in on rolling drums and wonderfully discordant horns that summon up the chaos of an overcrowded passenger car. “Zingarella”, the world’s most ominous and murderous wedding song, builds to a vicious climax. Aaron Diskin’s voice, sometimes gratingly histrionic, sounds howlingly desperate. There are some fairly half-hearted concept album trappings here about an Eastern European immigrant journeying to the US, but the conceit never quite takes hold, and seems to be dropped halfway through the record. That, really, is indicative the album’s fundamental flaw. Though there’s strong musicianship on display here, and many moments are joyful, funny and even glorious, in sum the thing feels a bit thrown together, unfinished, half-formed. And their new emphasis on English lyrics, probably intended to garner a wider audience, is ultimately a mistake. It draws attention to the weakness of those lyrics and underlines what I’ll call the Borat Factor: a creeping feeling that this might all be some kind of condescending joke. (Are the accents fake? I can’t tell, but I’m suspicious that this be an American group doing a skit.) When a band names one of their albums Fresh Off Boat, it’s hard to feel that there’s not a wink lurking somewhere in the background.

They’re at their best when they quit with all the mugging, stop shoving their thick moustaches in your direction, and let their alternately thrilling, menacing and adrenal music carry them away. On the beguiling and lovely Yiddish/English ballad “Come to Me”, vocalists Diskin and Ezekiel trade pick-up lines and rebuffs, propositioning one another and dancing off into a haze of shuffling drums and mysterious modal brass melodies. They can’t resist carrying every idea to its logical conclusion, though, so they spoil the delicate sensuality and tension of the song by blanketing the ending with Birkin & Gainsbourg-style orgasmic squeals. It’s this relentless need to please, this urge to reach for the nearest punch-line, that likely makes them a riveting live act. It also, unfortunately, prevents Citizen Boris from being much more than a mediocre album.


Tagged as: citizen boris | golem
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Punk is too strong a word for this band. The singers shout and wail, and the instruments sometimes leap into high gear, but their thrashing isn't angry punk thrashing. They're not rebels.
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