Sixteen Songs of the Chosen

Oy gevalt, indeed! I'm sure you can see the one-note joke here - Jewish and Israeli music played as surf music. One you get past the all too obvious Hava Nagila (track 1), you've really heard it all. To those who aren't familiar with the source material, these will sound like decent surf music - not especially outré or accomplished, but not too bad, with maybe something just a bit "off" about it. That's because the lead musician is a 20-year surf music veteran. To those who do know the source songs, it'll trigger "what the hell is that?" moments until they realize, ha-ha, that some guy is doing these Jewish tunes with twangy surf guitar. Then they'll track down the album (after you announce it), play it at a party, everyone will get a hee-hee-ha-ha out of it, then it'll sit unlistened to again until it's sold. I'm sorry; I can't endorse such a high-concept effort. What's next? Hey, how about famous classical numbers done to disco beats? Or Pink Floyd songs done as bluegrass?

Again, the music is not bad but don't try to pass this off as something oh-so-clever because it's not.

Mitigating factors: The booklet tells you what the various songs are - folk songs, Hanukkah, Yom Kippur, etc. - so there's an educational element. Mel Waldorf, the lead here, deems it worthy of mention in the press kit for this album that he has had compositions used in the ubiquitous kids' show SpongeBob Square Pants. As if that'll make this go down more easily.