Image by Jennifer Hofstetter
The Shondes pack heat and politics in Atlanta
October 11, 2008, at WonderRoot
By Beverly Bryan
Published: October 14th, 2008 | 12:50am
At the Shondes’ October 11 show at Atlanta’s WonderRoot, Elijah Oberman played a plugged-in violin with such physicality that he sometimes crumpled almost to the ground around his instrument. But no one in the band treated their instrument gently this past Saturday night on one of the last stops of a tour that started in August. All four members of the Shondes treated their Yiddish and classical–influenced post-punk like a heavy object to be lifted and carried.
This was especially true of bassist and lead vocalist Louisa Solomon, who charged at the mic as if to push the song forward with her body. Her powerful voice rose and fell with the other members’ voices and Oberman’s weeping violin, which gave the songs an ethereal, theatrical tone, while Temim Fruchter’s head-long drumming ensured that prettiness never compromised fire. Old-world romance elegantly intertwined with riot grrrl piss and vinegar onstage. Eat your heart out, Gogol Bordello.
As if to underscore how hard they rock, guitar player Ian Brannigan broke a string fairly early in the set. Solomon took the opportunity to lead the 30 or so audience members in singing happy birthday to a friend in the audience named Amanda. WonderRoot is a nonprofit, community-run arts center, and its tiny, stage-less basement venue allows for such intimacy.
In another moment of levity, Solomon said, “We like Atlanta” after proudly announcing that the Shondes hailed from Brooklyn. But she added the qualification: “We don’t like your baseball team.”
“We don’t like them either,” one woman in the audience assured her.
Shonde in Yiddish means a disgrace, a shame, or an outrage. The name choice doesn’t take a lot of unpacking after you consider that the band’s members proudly identify as "queercore," are mostly Jewish, and are staunchly anti-Zionist. Before starting a band, the members of the Shondes knew one another as activists and there is no question that there is a political intent to their music. Their song “I Watched the Temple Fall” is a clear plea to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The lyrics articulately separate (or reclaim) Jewish identity and spirituality from Zionist politics.
A lot of valid arguments have been made against overtly mixing politics and music — it takes the focus off important things like rhythm or, worse, excuses a band’s lack of talent or imagination. But those arguments don’t apply to bands whose politics become inseparable from the emotive quality of their sound.
On paper, this band sounds like a train wreck, but in real life they are completely arresting. Post-punk guitars plus Yiddish and classical melodic influences might seem disparate and unlikely to combust when mixed, but they made sense in context, and the band’s sheer fierceness in performing created enough heat to bond its influences into a musical whole. It also helped to fuse the personal and the political in the lyrics. As often happens in folk-punk (another audible element in the Shondes’ music), the private yearning in the love songs has a way of bleeding over into the yearning for a better world in the topical songs and vice versa until it isn’t clear where one sentiment ends and another begins.
The Shondes ended the night with “The Start of Everything,” a song whose words describe a spiritual awakening through music and whose swelling melody was every bit the sound of that awakening.
Issue #31
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brooklyngrrrl (about 1 month)
Wish I'd been there!! SOunds awesome.
nstans (about 1 month)
YAY SHONDES!!!!!!!!
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