Groyse Metsie - Mein Shtetala

Hear The Track Here

Last track up from Popspace this month is head honcho Chris Bishop's personal pick. If you follow these reviews, you will already know that this man has an incredible pair of ears - all his picks have been very, very tasty.  Now if you are thinking that I have developed a bad case of dicks...dix...dikx.. that spelling problem some people have, I havent.  Neither has the cat walked accross my keyboard. (Educational Ed: the term Gilmore is mangling is Dyslexia, a serious learning disability which should not be joked about. I'll spank him later) As our less parochial readers will have suspected, Groyse Metsie is an Isreali musician playing Jewish music he refers to as 'klezmer' along with more modern western instruments and electronica.

Sounds effective enough long before you put the needle on the record (as it were) but that is usually the case with Chris Bishop's picks anyway so nothing new there. Being a diehard World music fan I admit I was seriously looking forward to hearing this track, and it didn't let me down but there again I never expected it to. Similar, but in the vaguest way, to the way stringed instruments are treated in the Greek tradition, the musical style was instantly familiar although I suspect that people who don't really get this whole World music thing would be scratching their heads in bewilderment - and not just because the song is sung entirely in Hebrew either.

I am a very keen fan of the world music genre and I admit to some surprise that Mein Shtetala is billed as Freestyle whereas it's definitely world music through and through. Just something that may confuse listeners even more, but with the short attention span prevalent on the internet, every little helps when you are trying to attract an audience. People do tend to be swayed by labels after all, and in the case of Mein Shtetala that would be a real shame. Even though I understand not one word of Hebrew, I could have cared less. The clarity of the mix and the style of music more than made up for it, although after a while I felt the bass was a bit under-represented. That only becomes evident after you've heard it a few times and I've almost worn this bad boy out...

MUST HAVE World music. Traditional Hebrew song brought bang up to date.