Review Text
'Bad Old Songs', Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird's new album is a dark and more intimate follow-up to their 'Album of the Year' award winning 'Lost Causes' (2011). Originals like Kahn's wicked Berliner ostalgie ballad 'Good Old Bad Old Days' and the anti-love blues 'Love Lays Low' meet polyglot reinventions of Yiddish folk songs and classics from Leonard Cohen, Degenhardt, and Heine. In the desolate borderlands between Berlin, Detroit, New York, and Yiddishland, these Bad Old Songs are the midnight reveries of a lost time that is yet to come. From Rolling Stone (Germany): Poet, historian, radical Jewish songster and alienation klezmer virtuoso Daniel Kahn evokes the Berlin of long-ago on his new album with the international ensemble The Painted Bird. He begins this polyglot hora of an album with 'A Meydl From Berlin', a Yiddish folksong from 19th century Warsaw, and plays Franz Josef Degenhardt, Robert Schumann, and Leonard Cohen. In 'Good Old Bad Old Days' he pokes fun at ostalgie [East German socialist nostalgia kitsch]: 'I remember those nights down in old east Berlin / With the microphones listening under the floor'. 'Bad Old Songs' is an extraordinary collection of sinister, dark, furious, and mournful songs. The band this time is stripped down to a core quartet: Detroit born Berliner Bard Daniel Kahn on vocals, accordion, electric guitar, piano, ukulele, banjo, etc; New York Klezmer Wunderkind Jake Shulman-Ment on violin; Swedish Berliner Hampus Melin on drums; Michigan expat Berliner and sound artist Michael Tuttle on bass The album was produced in Xberg by Berlin's legendary engineer and producer Thomas Stern (Einstürzende Neubauten, Crime & The City Solution u.a.) DANIEL KAHN PRESS QUOTES: 'Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird are to Klezmer what the Pogues were to Folk: shtetl music spiked with a proper shot of Punk. . . Polyglot, Paneuropean Punkfolk. Kahn writes great crooked songs between Leonard Cohen and Mordechai Gebirtig, between Nick Cave and Hirsch Glik. With a light hand, he translates and adapts old songs, making them his own.' Die Zeit 'Clarinet and accordion are charged with Punk Rock; trombones march side by side with electric guitars. Archive treasures like Mordechai Gebirtig's or David Edelstadt's radical resistance songs meet the free-spirited attitude of the New York Tzadik circle, the flair of cabaret, and borrowed scatterings from Waits.' Stefan Franzen, Rolling Stone [German] review of 'Lost Causes' 'Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird play Alienation Klezmer: forward-marching and backward-glancing . . . Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird make truly great art.' TAZ 'Everyone's bouncing and drinking and Kahn sings of revolution, whisky and Zion, inner emigration and parasitism. He ends with the Yiddish folk song 'Dem Milners Trern,' known from the Coen brothers film 'A Serious Man.' Daniel Kahn, at once moralist and anarchist, is also a man who means it all seriously.'' Maik Brüggemeyer, Rolling Stone [German] (live concert review) 'When it's comes to wicked freaky Klezmer music, the Americans were always way ahead. Daniel Kahn, born in Detroit, living in Berlin, belongs to this caste of Yiddish music agitators. An absolute must for lovers of unusual, intelligent, challenging, exciting folk music and a blast at every instant.' Klaus Halama, Sound & Image Spotlighted on the stage and dressed in black, Kahn sang through a megaphone and switched between accordion, piano and ukulele as he chewed up stereotypes and spit them out in an almost in-your-face challenge to the audience. Ruth Ellen Gruber, Ruthless Cosmopolitan 'Kahn's great and artful songwriting follows in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits.' DPA 'While many artists in Klezmer (and folk music generally) are concerned with preserving the past, Daniel Kahn seems determined to bend it to his will. . .Without exaggeration, it's some of the best songwriting I've ever come across.' Jon Patton, Driftwood Magazine. 'Commune-music that is furious,
