The Sway Machinery
Hidden Melodes Revealed
J-Dub Records
By Jose Fritz
Imagine a rock band with a full horn section. They sound nothing like Ace Cannon, nothing like The Bosstones, nothing like Electric Flag, Chicago, or even Ides of March. The Sway Machinery tweaks the klezmer structure the same way a glitch-core band bends a circuit. There is some remaining shell of the original idea but the unit is fundamentally changed. It flies in the face of any traditional notion that “ethnic music” is static and frozen in the past.
I have this old Kinor label 78 klezmer record. It’s from 1951, pressed in the last dwindling years before total LP dominance. Side A is a performance of “Yimai Ha-Chanukah” by Helen Schraeter and Shirley Cohen. It’s a children’s record, but it draws that exact caricature of traditional Jewish music that we still retain today. Somehow these stereotypes persist even after the popular success of artists like Matisyahu and the Beastie Boys. Individual Jewish artists are accepted as they present themselves, it’s genres we judge to be stagnant. It’s crap. The Sway Machinery grind their heels into the delusion.
In 2007, The Sway Machinery released their first album strangely with the same title and most of the same line up: Jeremiah Lockwood from Balkan Beat Box, Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Colin Stetson of the Tom Waits' band, and a few guest horn men from Antibalas. They open the new record in chaos as the universe once did —in spectacular cacophony: a flam, snare rolls the dry clank of a dry cymbal bell, dull thuds of marching snares, nondescript clicks, barks and siren howls —then in a cavalcade of fast horn blasts a coalescing bass line appeared and order overcame all things.
On “A Staff of Strength,” liquid notes highlight the rhythm on a saxophone like a second vocal line and drag the whole beast onto the same nightclub as Morphine. It makes for verses that that lurch more than they move, slither instead of crawl and strut instead of run.
After that the record has no end and knows no boundaries. “Ivdu Es Hashem” sounds like a Firewater cover. The track “Anim Zemiros” screams white funk as much as anything Mark Ronson ever touched. Back beat clapping punctuates as much of the song as does the cantorial chanting. But as a whole the record maintains an aura of cock-or-the-walk cool on par with the Chrome Cranks. Songs rumble and churn thru mariachi rhythms, strange blues guitar riffs and bitter bhangra beats. The sadness, the sweetness, the lusty late nights and the empty opium dens are all here. It’s a world that lasts all the way to the final screaming high notes at the end of the last trumpet solo in the world.
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