That colorful jumble of instruments new and ancient, parachuting camels, Martian dirt, and bright banners on the cover of Nu-Med, the second album from Balkan Beat Box, is, to be perfectly honest, a really cheesy Photoshop job. But it is also apropos for an album that sounds like this: the band stirs klezmer, gypsy horns, surf, dub, Arab taqsim, hip-hop, funk, jazz, electro, circus music, and a few dozen other things together to make a raucous ethno/electro-acoustic gumbo that highlights the increasing inadequacy of the generic "world music" tag.
Founded by drummer/programmer Tamir Muskat and woodwind player and former Gogol Bordello member Ori Kaplan, both originally from Israel, the band gleefully adds its name to the ever-lengthening list of groups drawing inspiration from Eastern European sounds while rigorously avoiding sounding traditional. The lyrics, on the songs that have them, are in several languages, reflecting the music's transcendence of borders. The instrumentals simply revel in the collision of genres, and are played with a jazzy looseness in spite of their programmed undercarriages. "Quand Est-ce Qu'on Arrive?" even includes a sly quotation from Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" that brings the album's primary theme to the fore without saying a word.
The album's opening track, a collage of crowd noise, rhythmic vocalizations, and muffled beats, sends the listener in a few directions at once, with snatches of hip-hop and dancehall reggae ultimately getting overwhelmed by klezmer horns. "Hermetico" follows this up with an elastic beat, a strangely elegiac horn part, and MC Tamer Yosef robo-rapping through a processor, his flow clearly influenced by Jamaican dancehall.
The band makes interesting use of most of the vocals on the album. "Joro Boro" pairs surf guitar with gypsy horns and Bulgarian vocalist Dessislava Stefanova, who is multi-tracked singing microtonal harmony with herself in the tradition of her country's women's choirs. Guest Dunia is also multi-tracked, as she sing-raps over dubbed-out horns on "Habibi Min Zaman", mixing straight flow with Middle Eastern melisma and fluttering ululations.
The show is largely stolen from the vocals by the horns, though. The horn section on these songs includes as many as seven members on certain tracks, with a full complement of tubas, trumpets, flugelhorns, as well as woodwinds including saxophones and the occasional clarinet. It can be light and fluttering one moment, then thunderous and commanding the next. One could be forgiven for thinking that a big pile of different sounds from around the world would amount to nothing more than a mess, but in the uniting embrace of well-executed beats, it all comes together to form an enjoyable spectacle. The biggest problem with the album is its somewhat excessive length-- there are passages that are too repetitive that could have been trimmed-- but it amounts only to a small portion of a few songs. At it's best, it's a brilliant collision that connects-- and in some cases, as with Jewish music and surf, re-connects-- genres in a distinctly 21st Century way.
