Syndication
Headbanger’s Thrall
Music
The Russian-Israeli members of the group have all played in other bands - including art-rock, punk, metal, classical, and electronica - which may explain the eclecticism of their music.
Print this article
Email this article
Other articles by Mordechai Shinefield
More in Arts & CultureTry this one on for size: In 2001, the members of the band Gevolt — six Russian Israelis, ages 23 to 31, based out of Ashdod — released their first album, “Sidur,” a collection of heavy metal songs performed in Russian. Driven by traditional European metal concerns — paganism, glorious battles and passionate love — and filled with a sensuous tone unlike those generally found in metal music, the album nevertheless generated mass indifference. And so, in search of a larger audience, Gevolt decided to switch to… Yiddish.
Lest one assume that this is a novelty act, a nostalgia-tinged conceit meant to grab headlines, pay heed: The band’s upcoming album, untitled as of yet, is one of the most sonically adventurous and intellectually engaging projects spawned in recent years.
The band members come from a diverse music scene, a possible explanation for the nervy eclecticism of their music. They’ve all played in other bands, including art-rock, punk metal, progressive metal, classical music and electronica. Yevgeny Kushnir, the band’s guitarist, plays in two other bands in his spare time: a rock/fusion/psychedelic band called Sumo Elevator and a psychedelic duo, Backnee. Still, it’s from an obscure subgenre of metal music that Gevolt takes most of its cues — the German movement known as Neue Deutsche Harte (New German Hardness), or NDH.
It is in this influence that Gevolt makes its bravest artistic statement. NDH bands have courted controversy with their attempts to shock audiences with Nazi sympathies; one of the most popular, Rammstein, never strays from its militaristic aesthetic and shows Leni Riefenstahl film clips in its music videos. Kushnir is careful not to criticize these bands, and gently distances Gevolt from Rammstein’s influence. “We don’t have anything to do with Rammstein, Nazism or anything like that,” he explained. “Having a low-voiced vocalist, heavy guitars and high-end production is something that we will not throw away because of [Rammstein].” Still, it is Rammstein’s essential conceit — the use of metal music as a show of dominant force — that attracts Gevolt to that style of music.
“Metal has a sort of its own energy, which you won’t find in jazz, psychedelicor klezmer music, for instance,” Kushnir said. “The key word is ‘power.’” By wrapping Yiddish words in metal music, Gevolt is trying to bring this power to Yiddish — to resurrect it.
On a cover of Hirsch Glick’s famous Warsaw Ghetto Partisan Song, “Zog Nit Keyn Mol, Az Du Geyst Dem Letsten Veg” (“Never Say That You Are on the Final Road”), that power manifests as defiant musical explosions and furious lyrics. It is not merely a musical adaptation. Gevolt’s cover seems to be the natural form that the song should take — all rage and fury, fists waving. It is in The Partisan Song, in fact, that Gevolt distinguishes itself, using a mismatch of genres to add meaning instead of eliciting a joke.
The other two songs on Gevolt’s promo are the light, festive “Tum Balalaika” and J. Kotliar’s “Shpil Zhe Mir a Lidele in Yiddish.” “Tum Balalaika” retains many of its original sounds, and the melody can be detected from within the harsh guitars and liquid metal sounds that appear on the track. And this fealty to the original tune may win Gevolt nontraditional fans, as Kushnir noted when asked what his grandparents think about Gevolt.
“An interesting fact: Put some Metallica to a Jewish old man, and he will say that it is noise. But right after he hears ‘Tum Balalaika’ in our heavy manner, he begins singing,” he said.
Indeed, the true irony of Gevolt’s use of NDH music may be that the band is redeeming a form of music that has its roots in the Yiddish community. NDH is a branch of industrial music, and industrial music emerged as a musical form of Dadaism. According to Tom Sandqvist’s history, “Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire” (The MIT Press, 2006), the community was a product of Eastern Europe shtetl life and Yiddish romanticism.
Thus the freshest and most surprising sound in the Yiddish revival is the one most steeped in history. Gevolt’s new music is like a resurrection, a theme not unheard of in metal music and one that Kushnir would probably describe with a bare but telling adjective: “Headbanging.”
Mordechai Shinefield is a music critic who has written for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and the New York Press. He also writes a weekly online music column called Melody Macher for the Forward, which this week features a related Gevolt piece and sound clips.
Comments
Right on, Ann!! Plus one of them said somewhere that Rammstein are one of the roots from which they grew! It's good that the Gevolt guys know more about the NDH scene than the Forward!! Although I don't know why they feel the need to distance themselves from Rammstein, when you can hear "Du hast" in "Ekh ma tru la la" so clearly. Nothing at all wrong with that! And far less than slandering bands with having Nazi sympathies...
Based on this Mordechai Shinefield's new article about Gevolt the point I tried to make about Rammstein before didn't quite hit home. Either that or I am not getting his point of provocation. ;-) Of course not everyone needs to be familiar with every musical scene, but one sets higher standards for music critics than normal listeners. So I'll quote again:
May 2001 "Pulse," Number 203 "Teutons of Fun: Spontaneous Combusting With Rammstein, East Germany's Most Explosive Export" by Bill Forman
...As if onstage destruction and depravity weren't enough, Rammstein has also been accused of fascist sympathies, an accusation it attempts to counter with a track on the new album called "Links-2-3-4." "This song was supposed to be Rammstein's answer to the criticism," says Schneider (Rammstein's drummer), "but now we got into new criticism abroad because they don't understand the lyrics. So in America, they hear only the militant style of the music without hearing the lyrics." Still, if the band is apolitical, and wishes to be perceived as such, what was the point of using footage from Leni Riefenstahl's Third Reich-sponsored "Olympia" in its "Stripped" video?
"Provocation is our middle name," says Schneider. "We knew this video would be provocative. And even before that, the media tried to box us into a right corner politically. So we used this video to give people an actual reason to start discussing us. And there was a discussion, definitely. We wouldn't do it again probably. Certainly this wasn't any kind of expression of our political views, anyway. It was provocation; we wanted to see how people reacted. Especially with Germans, who have, you know, identity problems. They don't know where their culture is at any given point. Another thing, don't forget, these are beautiful pictures. These images of sports went well with the music, and so we use them as an art, not as a political statement.
"Rammstein is creating its own music and it's also trying to look for a piece of the German culture," he continues. "And as soon as you try to do that in Germany, you're confronted with the political past, the history. And then you are accused of identifying yourself with this rightist movement of the past, which is not the case. I mean, this is the reason for the provocation. We want to make people think of what their German culture could be and could evolve into, and not always just imitate the American culture. And as soon as you do that in Germany you're in trouble."
Maybe the writer's only research into Rammstein was reading Claire Berlinski's hatchet job in the Times a few years back. The NDH term isn't one that the members of Rammstein invented, it was given to them. They've said repeatedly that they have no fascist political leanings or neo-nazi sympathies. That they deal in a fascist artistic aesthetic certainly leads to confusion, but if you actually listen to the lyrics it's apparent there's a degree of self-deprecation and tongue-in-cheek humor in much of their material. I think we can agree that such irony would seem impossible from the typical neo-nazi, humorless, self-important creatures that they are.
p.s. I'm somewhat loath to bring this up, but for what it's worth, Rammstein guitarist Richard Kruspe married a Jewish woman, and for a time asked to be identified in print as "Richard Kruspe-Bernstein." The couple resides in New York, that haven of neo-nazism.
It is sad to see that my words were taken out of the context.
I want to state that I know that Rammstein is not connected to nazism, and I appreciate their art. I didn't mean to connect Rammstein to nazism in any way.
he provocating quote “We don’t have anything to do with Rammstein, Nazism or anything like that" was my defensive reaction on a statement which included the terms "Rammstein" and "nazi".
I asked Mordechai not to show my words in that "anti-Rammstein" shade right after the interview, but got no reply.
Yevgeny Kushnir.
Thank you, Yevgeny! You just made my morning a lot happier with that comment. I love your music and Yiddish works perfectly for it.
Rammstein are NOT and have never been Nazis. I appreciate what Gevolt is doing but they could do a lot worse than to follow in Rammstein's footsteps.