Fool's Gold - Fool's Gold (2009)

Genre: Indie,Afro-Pop,World Music
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Tracklist

1. Surprise Hotel
2. Nadine
3. Ha Dvash
4. The World Is All There Is
5. Poseidon
6. Yam Lo Moschech
7. Night Dancing
8. Momentary Shelter

Fool’s Gold’s self-titled debut is a dizzying, dazzling blast of pan-cultural big-band jams. Featuring a core crew of ten members, the ever-changing ensemble build big, busy, brassy shrines to polyrhythm; huge arrangements in which cascading parts almost seem to topple over each other as the songs march forward.

Lead-off track/lead single “Surprise Hotel” is the most African of the bunch; with highlife-styled guitars spangled over Ghanaian percussion colliding with Eritrean meters. What’s curious, though, is that vocalist Luke Top isn’t singing in English —a language that, on the continent, can be tied to both conquering colonialists and battles for independence— but his own historical mother-tongue, Hebrew.

For many, listening to foreign-sounding music sung in a foreign tongue won’t seem strange, but Top’s singing forges connections across continents; from the Middle East to the Horn to Cape Vert. And, as Fool’s Gold bash out their Afro-Islamic-Hebrew hybrid, they don’t sound like just some world-music revue. The LP's giddy grooves evoke, at varying times, New York acts ranging from Talking Heads to James White and the Blacks to Antibalas. Hell, “Yam Lo Moshech” sounds something like Tel Aviv’s answer to the Style Council.

Which leads to the invariable bottom line: when music hits a groove this good, worrying about cultural plurality —or, even, this recent tidal wave of African-influence indie acts— seems like unnecessary woe. Let the defenders of ethnomusical purity stomp their feet in protest; everyone else can just put on their dancing shoes.