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Album Details

• Artist: Geoff Berner
• Album: Whiskey Rabbi
• Label: Black Hen
• Year of Release: 2005
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2006-12-28

Berner is an accordionist who sure knows his back alleys. His stated aim is to return klezmer music to its smoky bar roots, and on this release his tunes are as sweaty and subversive as anything you’ll find this weekend at your favorite dive. Beer will not only help you enjoy this release, but a few shots of hard stuff are all but mandatory.

With Eastern European sensibility—love of the absurd, defiant drunkenness, death, and poetry rooted in the local and personal—Berner’s klezmer bounces and wobbles, like a tipsy rabbi on Purim. “Lucky Goddamn Jew” and “Drunk All Day” are odes to the spirit of God and liquor. The ominous “Song Written in a Romanian Hospital” and “The Inlistenable Song,” along with “And Promises To Break Before To Sleep” create entire worlds of dread and resignation. Likewise, “Traveller’s Curse” which condemns inhospitable treatment of strangers, delivers its moral lesson with raw honesty and a drunken wink.

With his chops and soul in the right place, Berner has absorbed the real juice out of a great ethnic style, and injected new power into it by respecting its legacy. With this record, adds to that history, with loud, mystical, puking joy.

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