Victory Party (Mint)

Beauty and black humour are the dominant themes in Geoff Berner’s new record, and it probably helps to analyze it from the outside in. Let’s start with the cover. On it, an ass (of the ungulate variety) is shown playing an accordion—Berner’s instrument—while a skeleton in uniform and a ghost-pale peasant girl dance a mad hora. Right away, we get it: this is a record about death, pleasure, and the European past. It’s a serious undertaking, in other words, but the donkey at the helm isn’t afraid to push things to extremes.

This Berner does on the tellingly titled “Rabbi Berner Finally Reveals His True Religious Agenda”, in which he posits the Bible as a mirror, showing us God’s word in puzzling reverse. “Did you really think a perfect G-D wants you to burn a goat?” he asks, and you can’t help but laugh.

In fact, there’s laughter aplenty here, although sometimes the chortling comes through clenched teeth—or broken teeth, as on the cautionary fable “Laughing Jackie the Pimp”. Meanwhile, the pointed wit of the oppressed is unleashed on “Dalloy Polizei”, which asks timely questions about police brutality and shares a title, in translation, with a certain N.W.A. rap anthem from 1988. Further klezmer/rap connections are explored in Josh “Socalled” Dolgin’s genius-on-a-budget production, especially on the electronically augmented horror story “Oh My Golem”, which may or may not be about Israel.

I’m speculating about that; it’s not something that Berner makes explicit. But one of the beauties of this record is that its maker doesn’t always spell things out as programmatically as he has in the past, and this comes out especially poignantly in his cover of the Yiddish labour anthem “Mayn Rue Platz”. Using Lan Tung’s voice and erhu to link the plight of New York City’s long-gone garment workers to that of contemporary Chinese sweatshop labourers is both brilliant and subtle. It’s also a welcome reminder that, no matter how bleak the landscape, music remains one of the best vehicles we have for promoting positive change.