The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Heroes of the Army of Love: The reunion of Polyana Frank was everything one could hope for - Walla! culture

2022-07-17T07:45:55.290Z


Even 30 years after these songs were written, the band's performance at the Gagarim Club in Tel Aviv proved that they are not suitable to serve even today as the soundtrack of the global state of emergency.


Heroes of the Army of Love: The reunion of Polyana Frank was everything one could hope for

Even 30 years after these songs were written, the band's performance at the Hagarin Club in Tel Aviv proved that they are not suitable to serve today as the soundtrack of the global emergency.

Equally important: the bass, drums, keyboards, guitars and voice of Ben Ezer, a local rock legend, blended wonderfully into a musical punch in the stomach

Nadav Menuhin

17/07/2022

Sunday, 17 July 2022, 10:04 Updated: 10:31

  • Share on Facebook

  • Share on WhatsApp

  • Share on Twitter

  • Share on Email

  • Share on general

  • Comments

    Comments

The soundtrack of The Apocalypse.

Polyana Frank (Photo: Orit Ben Ezer)

Maybe it's the sense of urgency that is always present in Israel, or the anxiety that accompanied the end of the second millennium, but there is almost always something apocalyptic in the songs of Polyana Frank.

The world is covered in ash, the sounds of alarms everywhere, holy wars that are about to begin and the terrifying smell of burnt flesh stinks all over the area.

These are songs that are 30 years old and older, but the sense of urgency in them is unfortunately incredibly topical.

The alarms never end, the season is always covered in ashes. 



Indeed, the band's rare reunion, which took place last night at the Hagarin Club in Tel Aviv, proved no better than Polyana Frank's songs to serve as the soundtrack to the global emergency, evoking some longing for a healthy subversive emotion that has become quite difficult to find in Israeli music.

An act of resistance.

Polyana Frank (Photo: Orit Ben Ezer)

After all, Polyana Frank - one of the most radical acts operating here in the late 1980s and early 1990s - was an essentially subversive band.

Certainly in the lyrics - she displayed demonstrable anger over the patriarchy, violence, fascism and general bourgeois decency - but also in the anarchist style of her recordings, which seemed to despise the commercial production line of the music industry.

Sometimes, her songs matched the most beautiful moments of the alternative rock of the era, and sometimes they sounded like a bunch of kids recording laughs.

And so, between humor and pointing to evil, danger, propaganda and stupidity, and without being ashamed to take a stand, an influential cult phenomenon was born that did not age even a little.

Therefore, even now, and precisely now, watching a performance by Polyana Frank is first and foremost an act of resistance, and only then a nostalgic celebration.



One can expect and hope that the current, ever-conscious era will encourage a new generation to discover what Polyana Frank has to offer.

However, the full club word of mouth included, in a slightly disappointing way, mostly an older audience, in what also looked like a kind of cycle meeting.

For everyone who came, Sharon Eliot Ben Ezer, Ami Levy, Razi Ben Ezer, Shabi Uziel and the strengthening drummer Roni Sheffer (The Wolves) prepared a long and invested set, which included 20 songs - including almost the entire cast "Living and Dead in the Closet" and the album "Do Not Choose".

More importantly, even though she did not perform for good years, the band did not sound even a little rusty: the bass, drums, keyboards, guitars and voice of Ben Ezer herself were combined with electrifying energies and perfect coordination.

That's all there was to it.

More on Walla!

Pixies and Jerry Cantrell picked up the exhibition grounds in Tel Aviv - watch the full performance

To the full article

A long and invested set.

Polyana Frank (Photo: Orit Ben Ezer)

It all started slowly and quietly.

Polyana Frank opened the show with Emily Dickenson's "I Measure Every Grief I Meet," and continued with a sequence of five songs in English, with all the band members slowly joining the stage.

When "Dykes and the Holy War" and "Marble" arrived, the audience also began to wake up.

But it was just the heating.



The climax of the show, for me, came not long after, with Amir Gilboa's "In the Dark" and Esther Raab's "I Dreamed."

"Darkness" is a simple and abstract song about the repression of violence, which is powerful in the few words written in it.

Uziel hit the bass, the keyboards and drums joined, Ben Ezer activated the crowd, and everything crystallized into a kind of musical punch in the stomach.

And if "Darkness" was a painful blow, "I Dreamed" - a song that contains the whole heart of the band from the impending disaster to the insistence on love - has already knocked me out. 

An Israeli rock legend.

Elliott Ben Ezer (Photo: Orit Ben Ezer)

Later, after a new song (!) Called "In These Hands" by the poet Adi Caesar, which fits in perfectly with the band's historical repertoire, the sequence of "hits" of the band began - "The besieged and the righteous";

"Hero of the Defense Army" ("Sing with us only if you think it was written about you");

"Ziva", perhaps the most absurd hit in the history of Israeli music for generations;

And "Strange Fruit", according to the classics of Billy Holiday and the original melody of Ben Ezer. 



Ben Ezer, an Israeli rock legend, enjoyed and got excited on stage.

Her physical and artistic voice is as clear as ever: she expects the audience to be brave, to look directly at the chaos taking place, and to demand change.

Before the end of the encore, which included five songs, and after a sequence of thanks, her last message to the audience was to go out and vote ("not voting is like voting for the other side").

The show ends with "Another Country" combined with "I Have No Other Country" by Corinne Elal, and the words that sealed everything, "

  • culture

Tags

  • Polyana Frank

Source: walla

All tech articles on 2022-07-17

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.