Noga Erez
Off The Radar
8/10
8/10
Noga Erez sounds like an Israeli, millennial Annie Lennox. Throaty and seductive, her whimsical, contralto voice, combined with the fractured, experimental production of ‘Off the Radar’, creates a record that sounds like a classic, even though it’s brand new. The opening track, ‘Balkana’, is a trippy, winding number that I can imagine playing over the closing credits of a road trip movie, while the soft, slow ‘Worth None’ showcases that deep, sexy voice to its fullest. The song ‘Pity’ – with its classic electro-pop sound – was influenced by a sexual assault where bystanders filmed the attack on smartphones instead of intervening.
This is politically infused music that takes sound seriously. The instrumentals are complex and surprising – the strangely compelling, heady, digitally enhanced beats on ‘Dance While You Shoot’, for example, seem to have been composed for a club remix (Pendulum, are you listening?). It makes this for a debut record that’s not afraid of combining pure fun with heavy topics, despite the occasionally baffling lyrics – “skinny cat in a dog’s land”, anyone?
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