RIENCD91
Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird live up for their name as "radical Yiddish borderland bandistas with punk attitude” with their new album The Butcher's Share, the first in five long years. It is the most powerful and complex work of the band so far and is dedicated to the great political and personal themes of our time. Kahn's revolutionary songs for the Apocalypse are like a declaration of war to the present.
A lot has happened since the last album Bad Old Songs. Daniel Kahn, who was born in Detroit but has been living in Berlin since 2005, has reshuffled the band with new and old companions. Christian Dawid's clarinets, saxophones and brass instruments sound like a dead drunk sailor orchestra crashing a Jewish wedding, Jake Shulman-Ment's razor-sharp violin cuts through the songs, and Kahn is in top form as a singer and guitarist. Sometimes full of joke, sometimes like a nightmare, sometimes deeply sad, they smuggle the original pieces, translations and adaptations beyond the borders of language, history, culture and genre. Punk, Klezmer, Jazz, Brecht, Waits, Folk-Ballads and more shake hands, and producer Thomas Stern brings his whole Kreuzberg punk rock sensibility into the project.