Golem: It's Not the Size of the Boat

Two more blocks to go. Two more… t-w-o… but woe is me, it was two too many. The storm closed in too soon Thursday night as I rushed to the piers on the East side. The last couple blocks undid all my effort to stay dry and I quickly soaked to the bone. With stormy waves licking the sides of the boat, rocking it to and fro, I embarked on the Half Moon, a small tugboat-like vessel with two levels. I slowly dried off and warmed myself with some rum as we set off into the New York harbor. Somewhere between the dock and the Williamsburg bridge, gliding down the East River, the band started up; if I had felt like a third class passenger in stowage before, I was fucking Fievel now. Any minute and we’d get our first glimpse of Lady Liberty, of Amereeeka.

Not just any band could transpose the vessel into such a spectacle: one conjuring the goal of finding a new life in the New World. The band rollicking away in cut-time like a carnival out of Kiev was Golem, a Yiddishly wonderful troop from Brooklyn who came to celebrate their new album, titled –AHEM- Fresh Off Boat. With the heaps of attention that Beirut Beirut has recently been receiving, this other local outfit has released their own tribute to the customs and culture of the Russian and/or/sometimes Balkan Indie Rock scene. And the Yiddish Do Dance. On a boat, that rocks to and fro, you cannot not move lest you be caught off-balance and thrown into the accordian.

Did I mention they played on a boat? Around the Statue of Liberty? That’s like seeing The Knife play a Haunted House, Man Man play Coney Island, or Garth Brooks play NASCAR. The setting was made for the music.

My ability to criticize Yiddish music is limited. My background is really in snowcore, a genre I've created to avoid criticism of my ability to criticize. Yet, I find Golem's music inherrently attractive. It's highly cultural, but beyond the bounds of culture. Everyone can dance an Hora as well as they can dance a Jig: that is, with rum, flawlessly. The audience was a cross section of age, race, religion, and nationality that made it the melting pot I've grown to love about New York. Give me your huddled masses...

Then as quickly as the Statue of Liberty appeared, it went all David Copperfield-like and vanished as we drifted back upstream, disembarking without inspection nor truncation of name.

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Golem go on tour with Balkan Beat Box and are playing Southpaw on September 16th [tix]. Stream some Golem songs over at Purevolume.

I [re]learned today that Fievel immigrated from Russia, making the analogy all the more apt.

Finally... a golem kinda looks a lot like a yeti.