Ok history first! Jewish accounts from the olden days tell us that a Golem is a creature made from stuff that ain’t alive in the first place. Please see the cover photo of this album for a picture or just imagine Madame Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock. Anyway this sextet doesn’t pull any GWAR action on stage. Think more gypsy hot potato shaking the rafters music. Think lots of frilled tuxedo shirts, violins, beaded necklaces, guitars, sharp snare drums, vodka bottles, repeating choruses, accordions, trombones, tambourines, trumpets, hell throw a tuba in there too.
The two lead singers, Annette Ezekiel and Aaron Diskin, passionately haggle over the lyrics of each tune. One sings a Yiddish bar, then the other tears it away and sings their own only to have it wrestled back by the original singer. An ardor laden exchange develops, like an extended Williams/Sharapova tie-break. The vocals, not sung in a familiar tongue, suggest, outline, shape and hint at the tune’s meaning.
Right. I have no idea what they’re singing about but in my imagination they’re about the lost days of tenderness and love. I don’t speak or even understand Yiddish, so I’m stumped. Happily it doesn’t detract. These songs, I suppose much like ‘ol Golem himself, take on a life of their own created from the frolicking gypsy steeped log flume rides the music takes us on.
These guys are all Lower East Side, NY-NY. So if you live there you’ve got a good chance of catching them live so, go, go, GO! The rest of us have to keep hoping for that fucking lottery ticket to hit and listen to their fantastic record in the meantime. JDub is a non-profit record label, imagine that? Please buy, don’t just Citrus this one.
