Track Listing

1. Keep 'Em Straight (Intro)
2. Hermetico
3. Habibi Min Zaman
4. Bbbeat
5. Digital Monkey
6. Balcasio
7. Pachima
8. Quand Est-Ce Qu'on Arrive?
9. Mexico City
10. Delancey
11. Joro Boro
12. Gypsy Queens
13. $20 for Boban
14. Baharim (Outro)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44470 in Music
• Brand: Dig
• Released on: 2007-05-15
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .16 pounds

Amazon.com
It seems impossible to avoid the fusion and clash of cultures in world music these days. Connectivity means it's all within your (everyone else's) reach. Here on their second album, Nu Med, Balkan Beat Box continue to play at the nexus of Eastern European, klezmer, Arabic, hip-hop, rock and electronic music. Headed by Israelis Tamir Muskat (drums, programming) and Ori Kaplan (saxophone), the band's sound is far from forced, easily summing up the musicians' lives in their homeland as well as their current experiences living in New York City. As with all great folk songs, the melodies are insistently catchy enough to get listeners to sing or hum along before the song ends. Highlights include the Saharan dancehall cut "Digital Monkey," the insistent "bbbeat," and the Dead Sea surf guitar sound of "Joro Boro," which features singer Dessislava Stefanova. Like the first album, this one is as fun as it is far reaching. --Tad Hendrickson

Label
With Nu Med, Balkan Beat Box steps forward with a cohesive new album that imagines a Middle East without borders and a healthy dose of New York energy. Balkan Beat Box blends electronic music with hard-edged folk music from North Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

BBB makes connections that politics often keep separate. Jewish, Gypsy, Arabic, and American are united by hip hop beats and dancehall toasts. BBB's musical hitch-hiking continues as they mix things up with dub and electronics, juxtaposed with ancient Moroccan and Mediterranean melodies. The band's sound gives equal weight to soulful acoustic timbres and digital rhythms creating a uniquely organic sound with electronic elements. Echoing his growing involvement in their live shows, MC Tomer Yosef is a dynamic presence on Nu Med, blazing his way through featured tracks Digital Monkey, Mexico City, & Hermetico.

Customer Reviews

the sequel might be better than the original
Balkan Beat Box's self-titled debut was terrific, but after listening to Nu Med, the first BBB disc seems almost like a test run to make sure this crazy mash of balkan folk, Jewish and Middle Eastern melodies, beats, pieces, party horns and snippets of politics could actually work. And did it work.

In this record, they've firmly established their groove and the sound here is a more complete package. (And more hilarious cover art: I'm a fan of the parachuting camels motif.) It's also more lyric-heavy than the first one, and filled with live snippets and clips of cheering crowds from tours past, adding to the infectious flavor of the record. At 14 tracks, it probably runs a couple numbers too long, but I'm hard-pressed to tell you which ones should have been cut, because they're all good. If you liked the original Balkan Beat Box, you will like this. And if you don't know BBB yet you can start with this record or the debut without missing out. But you're probably going to end up owning both, like me, because this is some of the most exciting and energetic music being made today.

This is a fantastic album!
How do you top an album that starts off with a rooster crowing? With a Digital Monkey, of course! After enjoying BBB's first album for a year and a half, I wasn't sure how I'd react to this album but it definitely delivers and is arguably even better, tighter and more varied than the first. This is a band who know who they are and where they're going (far, I suspect).

The blend of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Eastern European influences held together with a strong dance beat, mesmerising horns and surf-style guitar is hypnotic and very, very danceable. At once, an invitation to a joyous party and a call to transcend our cultural and national borders; Nu Med is music that reminds us we can all live (and dance) together peacefully.

There's not a weak track on the whole album, current favourites though are: Hermetico, BBBeat, Digital Monkey and Joro Boro (the return of the Bulgarian Chicks!) This is a brilliant album and one you won't stop listening to anytime soon. And they're even better live!

New "med!"
Just look at the camels parachuting into a striped desert. Who wouldn't want to listen to what's inside?

Well, hopefully lots of people will. East European fusion music is moderately hot right now, with bands like Beirut and Gogol Bordello on the rise. But one of the best ones is Balkan Beat Box, whose second album "Nu Med" further polishes their ethnic hip-hop/rock sound -- it's just a thoroughly colourful, flavourful album.

It opens with a deliciously funky "Keep it Straight," which sounds like an Arabian market being invaded by hip-hop gypsy brass bands. It's followed by the deliciously colourful rap song "Hermetico," riddled with brass blats, handclaps, horses, and a voice telling us, "We're comin' straight through your ears, no complications... here we go, you better listen..."

They follow it with the exotic "Habibi Min Zaman," which sounds like a James Bond soundtrack in the Middle-East, and lead in to a bunch of even better songs: bootyshaking marches, sinuous rap, gypsy music wrapped in electrodance, folksy horn-rock, funky Balkan dance tunes, and colourful folk pop filled with yipping, yowling vocals.

If anything, "Nu Med" is even better than Balkan Beat Box's debut -- it's more polished and melodious, and more relaxed now that they have their sound down. But they don't change much musically, with the core of the music remaining the same: Middle-Eastern and East-European folk music, interwoven with modern dance, rock and hip-hop.

Musically it's a big hodgepodge -- you can hear some steely guitar buried under all the other sounds, which is the most normal part of it. Then you have nimble horns forming sinuous melodies and funky edges, solid drums, some colourful electronica, some accordion and some murmuring violins in "Mexico City," which is the one dud in the album. It's too sedate and mellow for the raucous overall sound.

But they also spice it up with samples and odd sounds -- babies laughing, horses neighing, a man calling out in another language. And in some songs, we get some very heavily accented rapping, usually pretty nonsensical: "I'm the digital monkey/supply the freakin' season with the rhythm that's funky/I come from Belize/but don't belong to no country..."

"Nu Med" takes what Balkan Beat Box had to begin with, and polishes it to gem status. Despite that one dud song, it's a wild, colourful festival ride, full of gypsy music and dance flavour.