Album Review

Boom Pam – Alakazam

• 23rd Apr 2012

World Music is a worrying beast isn’t it?

I will always remember it as the odd little section in HMV that nobody cared to pay any attention to.

The way we have clung to western culture’s rock and pop formulas and shun a more global view of music is only a sign of a narrow mind, and thankfully, as the power of the internet has become more widespread, we now find that our world is getting smaller and as a direct result, oddities of world music are for more likely to drop into our laps.

Take for example Boom Pam.

A Tel-Aviv based band releasing their third album of Mediterranean enriched surf-rock.

And no, I can’t quite believe it either.

Psychedelic lead track and album namesake Alakazam kicks things off in a manner that brings to mind the weirdness and experimentalism that is inherent in the music of Flaming Lips and Gogol Bordello and the sense of fun that these bands share is obvious as the album progresses through tracks that flit between traditional, lively instrumentation and a flighty lo-fi sound that is practically Tarantino-esque in its nature.

It certainly is an interesting proposition that fuels a compelling album, but disappointingly manages to have fizzled out before the forty five minute running time is over, failing to grasp my full attention to the very end as the reliance on instrumental tracks lets the initial curiosity subside and it succumbs to becoming just skewed background music.

This over-dependence on instrumental tracks does mean that the scattered vocal led songs such as Alakazam, TOP and U R Mine are welcome and refreshing, clearly standing out from the rest of the album and hooking you back in, but as the album plays throughout, these moments are far too few and far between.

A more balanced album, or perhaps a shorter offering may have stood stronger than Alakazam in its current form, yet it still stands as an accessible piece of modern ‘world music’ that must surely be worthy of a place in Giles Peterson’s record bag, if nothing else.