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Dana Kessler Helms Israel’s Best New Rock Band

Check out Mora Mahlifa for some intense Sonic Youth-like sound

by
Liel Leibovitz
November 26, 2014
Mora Machlifa(Liron Sokolski)
Mora Machlifa(Liron Sokolski)

Every magazine likes to think its contributors are rock stars, but we mean it literally: Dana Kessler, our correspondent to Israel’s eclectic culinary scene, is also the lead singer and bass player for Mora Mahlifa, one of the more exciting Israeli bands in recent memory.

To pin down the group’s sound, you can think of Sonic Youth or the Breeders or any of the other outfits of the indie royalty of the 1990s, but that would fall short of capturing the magic. As one Israeli critic wrote in a recent review of Mora Mahlifa’s newly released album, the band’s real sound is rooted in Tel Aviv’s music scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where American post-punk was played loudly together with melancholy British guitar rock and hard-edged German industrial music and imbibed by local kids eager to escape the airlessness of a small country with a tight cultural scene that had little patience for weirdos who liked their music loud and disharmonious. You sort of had to be there, I guess: I was, and so was Kessler, and if you listen to Mora Mahlifa, you will be there, too.

And there’s a lot of there there: the music is elastic and confident, a furious sound that signifies nothing except for the peculiar emotional state of Kessler et al. Now in their thirties, and parents, and ensconced in a small city that likes to pretend that it isn’t locked into a nation ravaged by so many conflicts and so much violence, the band’s members sound every bit like those rarest bird of rock, mature and sober artists who take to their guitars and amps to work out their anxieties and their fears. It’s very hard to do that well without sounding self-indulgent or whiny or, even worse, losing touch with the real and raw emotion that leads us to write rock songs. Mora Mahlifa pulls it off beautifully, and its moments of melodic tenderness, while rare, make the whole intense experience that much more sublime.

So as we retire to our tables and our turkeys, check out Mora Mahlifa’s new video. It is one more thing for which to be deeply grateful:

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.