Tamar Aphek was a prominent rock musician in her native Tel-Aviv, fronting such bands as Carusell and Shoshana before leaving for Paris to concentrate on her solo career. She came to rock music relatively late compared to most. After being trained on piano and singing in choirs, she picked up the guitar at eighteen after becoming captivated by the auspicious asceticism and asymmetric rhythmic explorations of post-hardcore bands like Fugazi. While the majority of her career since then has allowed her to embrace and reproduce the reverie of chaos and emotional exertion exemplified by bands like Sonic Youth, Elliott Smith, and Unwound, it was clear in her departure from Isreal that there was something else that was calling her. A desire to explore the cracks and fissures of rock music to find a new home. A brave and fertile crescent in which to nurture a new shamba of sound.
Not an insubstantial period passed between the point when Tamar embarked on her new musical journey and the release of her debut solo record All Bets Are Off. In fact, many of the songs on this record were recorded years prior to its release, often with different titles, and with a totally different band. The process of rethinking, evaluating, layering executing, and repeating, the structure and performance of these songs resembles a master oil painter at work. Years after lesser artists would have left these pieces to collect cobwebs in the attic of their discography, Tamar would still find reasons to return to older material in order to breathe new life into their calcified forms and make them flexible and real again.
Flexibility as a concept is operative in these mixes as hemoglobin is in your blood. It’s the driving mentality that pushes these tracks where they need to be and gives them life. What can feel like a straightforward take on a post-punky rhythm, in Tamar’s hands, is peeled of all of its pretensions in order to unfurl into a scintillating, sweltering sax splashed rill, such as the covert psychedelic saunter of “Show Me Your Pretty.” “All I Know” has a somewhat similar approach, driven by terse melodies that sound like the sportingly deadly play of a cat pinning and releasing a mouse only to claw it back into the reach of its jaws, a mischief made all the more ambivalent by the coltish Nico-esque purr Tamar adopts to give the song texture and fill out its character.
It would probably be interesting enough if Tamar had decided to integrate post-punk, garage, and psychedelia into a single cohesive sound, but as previously hinted, her vision for her first solo outing was considerably more expansive. “Drive” begins with a motorik beat and relaxed, inviting vocals, sounding a little at first like the pouty throwback pop of Nicole Atkins, but it quickly becomes evident that there is something more than nostalgia propelling this piece. There is an improvisational flair to it that is almost all but evaporated in contemporary rock ‘n roll, where the melody has a clear, conscious, and fluid constitution, but its momentum takes it in no certain or predictable direction. In this situation, a zig is as likely as a zag, and zag as likely as a Sicilian Defense. It’s effortlessly sophisticated in a way that can clearly show its work but isn’t possessed by the insecurity to need to do so.
As deliciously moody and atmospheric as this album is, it’s a little surprising to note that some of its highlights are actually amongst its more bracing. Opener “Russian Winter” and mid-album climax “Crossbow” have high energy, cacophonous rhythms that come in hot, ready to whip your body into some kind of shape that it’s not used to being in. “Russain Winter” starts out like an At the Drive-In b-side before collapsing into a swaying, break-beat backed chide that lights the fuse on a fast-acting fuzzbomb in the bridge and triggering a volley of Ethiopian farfisa chords in the outro. Later, “Crossbow” is a mean, trip-hop whirl that feels like being strapped into the seat of a helicopter that has just entered a tailspin- adrenaline has kicked in and everything has entered an ominous slow motion, where every second is expanded into an hour and yet events continue to transpire impossibly fast and beyond your rational ability to guide them in order to avert disaster.
As if to put as fine a point as possible on All Bets Are Off, the album takes its final bow to a bedroom-recording quality rendition of Dooley Wilson’s “As Time Goes By,” performed with a particular lonesomeness on an unplugged electric guitar, and accompanied by off-puttingly, off-key, string and synth arrangements that saw threw the melody like a bread knife through the arm of a chair. It’s lovely, but you can’t help but feel a little shocked once finished crashing its ambivalent course through your ear canal.
All bets may be off, but you can still get in on the action by streaming the entirety of Tamar Aphek’s debut album below via Bandcamp.
Get a copy of All Bets Are Off on Vinyl and CD here.
