Only Mimcha Ad Elai of the Hebrew selections comes close to matching Teisha Neshamot in its excellence, but it's the clunky, plodding bridge that instead demands something lyrical and softer and more distinctly different than what came before that dinged it down to a "4" for me.Ī quick look at the Rak Shalom website suggests that many of those performing the finest work on this release - the aforementioned Nadiv Panitch, the soulfully voiced Yonah Hamermesh, and Noah Broth - have either graduated or are about to shortly. Ad Machar suffers from the outset by dry (almost aiming for acoustic) miking that exposes some blend and tuning issues that are typically fixed in post by slightly overbearing vp (the only real misstep by Nadiv Panitch, who otherwise does terrific work throughout) and by a key change that feels wholly unearned. Tefillah means well in its message, but it's not especially helped here by being transposed down and including some re-harms that are at best odd (and in a few places seem downright wrong), nor by a lyrical mashup that comes wildly out of left field and feels entirely unnecessary. But that same creative issue is much more disappointing in the more narrative songs written in modern Hebrew that have stories to tell (of varying levels of depth).
And indeed, that's true of the mostly loud and louder Heyma, which also has some Hebrew pronunciation inconsistencies that I find frustrating as a Hebrew speaker (but I suspect many will not care). There's only so much one can do with a song that wasn't all that interesting to begin with, even if it's pleasing when you hear it the first time through. Often with Jewish a cappella, that's a particular problem in covers of more religious music, drawing on short liturgical texts that feature a very basic A-B-A-B structure that repeats ad nauseam. The arrangement of Love The Way You Lie / Fall For You suffers a little - as mashup arrangements frequently do when the songs mostly go together, but maybe not perfectly - but "yay" for thematic relevance and a cohesion that has eluded this group in the past when the members have gone the mashup route.Īlso inferred from the above, a fair amount of the Hebrew songs don't quite reach the same level of quality. Imitative horns aren't usually my jam, but the group makes it work in White Lines, led by an appealing solo from Noah Broth.
I may not love all the interpretive choices in When I Was Young - but at least, for a change, it is in fact a legitimate interpretation with very specific artistic choices, rather than just a slavish cover. To be fair, as alluded to above, most of the rest of the English repertoire offered here already shows many of these same signs of improvement to varying degrees.
This is the sort of thing I've been hoping to hear from Rak Shalom for a while now. Finally, we get a killer solo - technically a killer duet in this case - with two voices that blend terrifically and can handle both the pronunciations and the throaty (rather than nasal-y) tone needed to deliver the song. Finally, bass and vp are working together to anchor the rhythm section rather than leaving the vp on an island to work its superhuman magic on the groove alone. Finally, there are near-constant variation in background textures.
"If a Jewish a cappella group puts out an album where the Jewish material is the weaker half of the release, how do I deal with that?"įinally, a group that has historically leaned on big and loud and persistent block chords has given its work a real chance to breathe. There was a moment about halfway through my first listen of Rak Shalom's Midnight Waves where I could feel the question formulating in my brain:
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