Balkan Beat Box, That These Things Could Be Ours (4 x 4 review)

Artist: Balkan Beat Box
Title: That These Things Could Be Ours
Label: JDub Records (2005)
Genre: Hip Hop / World
Rotation: Reasonably Heavy

In this enlightened age of really excellent projects along the bleeding edges between various folk musics and club breakbeats, Balkan Beat Box brings us . . . klezmer hip hop. Can we even talk about how radically overdue this record is? Is the day really coming when a skinny white girl can get her groove on in a dance club to funky trans-global modernizations of Jewish folk music? Please let it be so. Balkan Beat Box, a.k.a. Iraeli-born Tamir Muskrat and Ori Kaplan (who’ve both collaborated with / been in Gogol Bordello), here teams up with musicians from Turkey, Morocco, Spain, and Bulgaria to produce, if not quite “great” hip hop, an enjoyable record nonetheless, pulled together by hysterical genre diversity and some impressive horn work. “9/4 the Ladies” (4) has the most Middle Eastern style percussion, and “Shushan” (5) sounds the most “American” (a little like Lyrics Born’s “Calling Out” in the chorus, actually). “Ya Man” (6) alternates a steel drum with a heavy metal bassline. “La Bush Resistance” (11) is dub-influenced and in English; I think it’s the weakest track on the album. Clearly, this record isn’t going to do it for everybody the way it will for our gypsy fusion connoisseurs, but mix it with some World and see what you think. I cannot explain the chickens.

All clean--vocals mostly in Hebrew and Arabic, and JDub Records is a non-profit, religiously affiliated group.
Recommended Tracks: 8, 7, 4, 6, 3