Search - Rockfour :: Nationwide

Excellent

Rotem Eren Rabinovich | around | 06/13/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Nationwide" is a mature album of silly music by some serious guys dabbling in a silly genre- neo-psychadelic pop-rock. Though with more straightforward production than their previous English-language releases, it confronts the originality issues inherent in the genre (some songs on "Another Beginning" sounded a little TOO much like Lennon or Bowie) much better. The songwriting and overall creativity is almost on par with their 1994 Hebrew-language masterpiece, "H'Ish Sh'ra'ah H'Col" ("The Man Who Saw Everything", on which there is a somewhat superior Hebrew version of Nationwide's To The End), and the performances are the best they have ever been. I especially love hearing the rythym section- Issar Tennenbaum's Keith Moon school of drumming approach is a refreshing departure from the human drum machines of otherwise superlative bands such as Radiohead and Muse (not to mention the neo-pop-punk bands...), and Marc Lazare's bass notes are actually SURPRISING relative to what the guitar is playing.The newest aspects of this album are how heavy Baruch Ben Izhak's guitars get on most songs, and the surprisingly beautiful gentle songs, Candlelight, Have A Good One, I Can Read You Now, and Much More To Offer. Though the Beatles are frequently and correctly sighted as an influence, the more proper touchstone for the first and last mentioned in the last sentence would have to be Brian Wilson's Smile sessions. Really something very special. Overall, the impression is of prime late-sixties, vaguely post-psychedelic pop, played with a contemporary heavy guitar sound and a much less naive sense of structure. The individual parts of Next Monroe or Mad Routine might have come from classic Beatles, Byrds, or Pink Floyd records (perhaps more accurately, from a fantasy record of The Who covering these songs), but the jumps between them are too surprising even for the deepest cavern of the summer of '68. This is ultimately also the band's failing- the sweet, simple pop components sometimes feel bullied by the air-tight riffs and hey-look-what-I-can-do transitions. But the soft songs are so beautiful, and the hardest rockers so satisfying- it feels unfair to ask more from a genuine 2004 psychadelic rock album.One final note on Eli Lulai, singer extraordinaire: I personally can hear an accent (in case you didn't figure it out yet, these guys are Israeli- and ipso facto the cause of all the world's problems...), but I'm not sure if most English-speakers will not just take it as a weird inflection. At any rate, he's a great enough singer to make listening to otherwise decent modern pop-rockers such as Hot Hot Heat and The Shins difficult. He never sounds like he's straining while making weird key jumps, and, in the great tradition of Lennon's walrus concerns and the like, makes lines such as "an average looking girl could be the next Monroe" and "shaky, what a shaky end (subtitles!)" sound immensely important. Unfortunately, the lyrics aren't quite as good as in the Hebrew-language albums, but in general the quality of English-language rock lyrics is not at a particularly high point these days. And no, the Israeli trivia is not at all essential to enjoying this album. If these guys came out of Oxford, I'd love 'em just as much."