Balkan Beat Box
Nu Med
by Dan Weiss

I don’t know how it went down, but I bet Ori Kaplan left Gogol Bordello because Eugene Hutz thinks in loops and that drives him mad. Whereas the average Gogol song stays firmly within punk-riff formula, whirling away at some testy violin figure until the song snaps, Kaplan’s a riff man who prefers to mutate, like jazz or techno. Nothing on Nu Med stays in one place for too long: every time you expect a track to safely return to its shelter of refrain, out pops some new idea itching to be worked at. The backlog of unresolved hooks on Nu Med may be unsettling to loop junkies, but that’s just fine. BBB’s not cool enough for hip-hop heads anyway.

It’s so hard to apply traditional nonwestern music to a supremely Western art like hip-hop, without an air of tokenism, or worse, eclecticism, a tag that even Beck’s sanded off as late ‘90s cash-ins like Elwood and Bran Van 3000 fell by the bin-side. In the 2000s, cases of endorsed eclecticism have been rare. Manu Chao comes to mind, and possibly something welded safely to dance beats, where anything goes, like the Avalanches. Because hip-hop has more rules for credibility than anything else save punk, this is extra tough for awkwardists like Kaplan and fellow Beat Boxer Tamir Muskat to translate in English, even with the aid of sublime instances like the harmonized females who hook the crunchy “Joro Boro.”

Take “Keep Them Straight (Intro).” No one needs a chant (sampled?) of someone repeating, “Keep them stra-ight / Now keep them straight,” to lard the enigmatic percussion-with-sax snaking underneath. Yeah, that kind of chanting is one of the original building blocks of hip-hop, but it’s not like they’re reinventing the roof on fire, no matter how many times they tack crowd noise onto it. This kind of posturing was more harmful to BBB’s 2005 debut, though, and it’s clear once the intro gives way to “Hermetico,” they’re becoming less self-conscious for the better.

No longer concerned with crashing a club they don’t belong to, these guys stark up their mix with Timbaland minimalism, scaling the pastiche factor back with claps and snaps and decaying G-funk synths. Klezmer sax is proven an acceptable (but not earth-shaking) replacement for trunk-rattling bass. The result is less daring than the get-used-to-it genre intimidation of like, Big & Rich, but it’s more tasteful. The new focus on hot drumbeats might even get them into the clubs, particularly the marching “BBBeat.” Only the Transylvanian, minor-key sax riffs confuse this group’s danceability potential. But the songs do keep going and going, bleeding into one another like any other consciously club record. But while plenty of club mixes have patches of bad rapping, not many come from the type of artist to boast “I’m the digital monkey!”

So forget that earlier crap about credibility and genre barriers. I spent so much time trying to figure out where these guys aimed to be slotted that I passed over “novelty,” because the drum and horn sounds were just too good. But they really do seem to embrace the novelty factor, reveling in a silliness that Gogol Bordello only flirts with. But there’s nothing silly or ironic about the state of the area of the world that their music lifts and blends from. Their website calls them a “natural reaction of musicians who wanted to erase political borders (as our ears don’t have them, why should we?),” and that silliness is how they ease themselves. Makes club cred seem kind of silly, doesn’t it?