Artist: Firewater
Album: The Golden Hour
Label: Bloodshot Records
Year: 2008
Reviewed By: Woodstock Slim
This is without a doubt my album of the year. So from here on out all the rest of the albums in this year will be compared to this. Oef! Competition is going to be tuff girls and boys. I am mostly speechless and my breath has been taken away. Zack Condon did a great thing when he brought the Balkan to Boston and opened our hearts to true melancholy. Firewater is
the next thing on the shelf next to all your Beirut Records, yes! Finally!
There are elements of Balkan Beatbox to it creeping in making it tangible to the Triphop Market I guess. In 2005, Firewater's Tod A embarked on what would become a three year sabbatical through the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and South East Asia. He had recently split with his wife; George W. Bush had just been re-elected; New York, his home for the last 20 years, had become a cold and foreign place. He wasn't even sure he wanted to make music anymore.
"I was extremely depressed. The NYC skyline looked like bad wallpaper to me. It was either kill myself or hit the road," he says. He put everything he owned in storage and left NYC with a few clothes and a laptop.
The journey Tod undertook would challenge him creatively in ways he couldn't have imagined in its planning stages. "I traveled overland starting in Delhi, India, across the Thar Desert, then through Rajasthan, onward through the Punjab, and into Pakistan," he recounts.
Recording with a single microphone and a laptop in his pack, he captured performances with a vast array of musicians across India and Pakistan--and eventually Turkey and Israel. Bhangra and sufi percussion would form the basis for the songs he wrote along the way--songs about the world he left behind ("This Is My Life", "Electric City"), politics ("Borneo", "Hey Clown"),
and dislocation ("6:45", "Feels like the End of the World"). Tod's acerbic wit shines on The Golden Hour, elucidating both the beauty and the absurdity of the world.
Firewater drummer Tamir Muskat (now also of Balkan Beat Box) produced, mixed and played on the album, along with a strange cast of characters from 5 different countries.
Firewater was birthed in a Brooklyn basement in the long, hot summer of 1997. Depressed, broke, and desperate, ex-Cop Shoot Cop leader Tod A tossed away a major label deal and a free meal ticket to launch what--at the time--was a crazy proposition: a punk band fueled by gypsy and klezmer tunes. Tod had stumbled upon a dusty box of records and cassettes in a Russian junk shop on West 14th Street, and had fallen in love with the happy/sad conflict embodied in Eastern European melodies. He wanted to combine the mystery and melodrama of these tragic-comic sounds with the energy of his first love: punk rock.
Album: The Golden Hour
Label: Bloodshot Records
Year: 2008
Reviewed By: Woodstock Slim
This is without a doubt my album of the year. So from here on out all the rest of the albums in this year will be compared to this. Oef! Competition is going to be tuff girls and boys. I am mostly speechless and my breath has been taken away. Zack Condon did a great thing when he brought the Balkan to Boston and opened our hearts to true melancholy. Firewater is
the next thing on the shelf next to all your Beirut Records, yes! Finally!
There are elements of Balkan Beatbox to it creeping in making it tangible to the Triphop Market I guess. In 2005, Firewater's Tod A embarked on what would become a three year sabbatical through the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and South East Asia. He had recently split with his wife; George W. Bush had just been re-elected; New York, his home for the last 20 years, had become a cold and foreign place. He wasn't even sure he wanted to make music anymore.
"I was extremely depressed. The NYC skyline looked like bad wallpaper to me. It was either kill myself or hit the road," he says. He put everything he owned in storage and left NYC with a few clothes and a laptop.
The journey Tod undertook would challenge him creatively in ways he couldn't have imagined in its planning stages. "I traveled overland starting in Delhi, India, across the Thar Desert, then through Rajasthan, onward through the Punjab, and into Pakistan," he recounts.
Recording with a single microphone and a laptop in his pack, he captured performances with a vast array of musicians across India and Pakistan--and eventually Turkey and Israel. Bhangra and sufi percussion would form the basis for the songs he wrote along the way--songs about the world he left behind ("This Is My Life", "Electric City"), politics ("Borneo", "Hey Clown"),
and dislocation ("6:45", "Feels like the End of the World"). Tod's acerbic wit shines on The Golden Hour, elucidating both the beauty and the absurdity of the world.
Firewater drummer Tamir Muskat (now also of Balkan Beat Box) produced, mixed and played on the album, along with a strange cast of characters from 5 different countries.
Firewater was birthed in a Brooklyn basement in the long, hot summer of 1997. Depressed, broke, and desperate, ex-Cop Shoot Cop leader Tod A tossed away a major label deal and a free meal ticket to launch what--at the time--was a crazy proposition: a punk band fueled by gypsy and klezmer tunes. Tod had stumbled upon a dusty box of records and cassettes in a Russian junk shop on West 14th Street, and had fallen in love with the happy/sad conflict embodied in Eastern European melodies. He wanted to combine the mystery and melodrama of these tragic-comic sounds with the energy of his first love: punk rock.
