14 August 2006

Black Ox Orkestar Nisht Azoy, Southern 2006

          Pretension is a hilarious thing, especially in the world of indie rock. The edges and boundaries of music as we know it continue to be stretched by rich white people entitled enough to purchase the instruments necessary to do so, and more and more rich white kids seem to be eating up every concept album and lengthy post-rock instrumental that ensues. And, although it seems I’m taking potshots at these types of musicians, the music produced is (for the most part) consistently rewarding. I love Godspeed! You Black Emperor as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t change the fact that they record pieces of music that build for twenty minutes and arrive nowhere.
          Black Ox Orkestar hail from Montreal, the Mecca of pretentiousness in North America, and they record music in the tradition of their shared Hebrew ancestry. All of the lyrics are sung in Yiddish, the instrumentation is largely in the klezmer style, and they even bellow with the same pained inflections and vocal mastery of the Balkan greats. Please remember that these folks are Jewish (French-?) Canadians though, several of which are also members of the aforementioned Godspeed and A Silver Mt. Zion. This may be the very definition of pretension, but Black Ox Orkestar have nonetheless released a transcendently beautiful album, Nisht Azoy- which translates to ‘Not This Way’.
          The reason that the album succeeds so much despite the imperialistic cultural pillaging taking place could be due to a number of things, but for me I think it’s because this is damn relevant cultural and thematic territory to explore. There’s nothing more post-modern than artfully reconfiguring the traditional music of perhaps the most tumultuous and sacred lands on earth, which is exactly what they accomplish on tracks like the ornately layered “Az Vey Dem Tatn” and the solemn album-closer “Golem.” Rock music began with white dudes approximating the intense sorrow of those less fortunate than themselves, and maybe that explains why Nisht Azoy sounds so enticing to my affluent, Caucasian ears.
          However, concept alone is not enough to sell an album, and luckily the members of the Orkestar are quite proficient masters of mournful tension and the almighty build. This album is significantly different than the klezmer-spiced tunes many of us familiarized ourselves with earlier this year on Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar, if not necessarily because of the musical aesthetic presented than certainly because of the more accomplished arrangements and overtly political overtones. Black Ox Orkestar will never be able to escape the fact that they are expertly trained post-rockers; no matter how hard they try to make these tunes into modern approximations of traditional Arabic folk music, it still sounds a hell of a lot like a Godspeed record.
          Anybody who’s spent fifteen minutes in a record store can tell you that indie music enthusiasts are often times pretentious hipsters. What they fail to consider is that in art, operating upon pretense is often a good way to creatively explore territories previously unfamiliar to the artist. We are living in a post-post society, and the implications and methods behind art are often more important than the actual product. But concept doesn’t mean a damn if the music isn’t engaging, and Black Ox Orkestar have made a reverent, elegant re-imagining of their shared cultural heritage.

--Erik Olson
Music Director

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