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Shmulikraut — Guts Voyage
(Bandcamp no#, 2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-07-03

Guts Voyage Cover art

Shmulikraut is an avant-prog chamber-rock band from the high desert lookout town of Mitzpe Ramon in southern Israel; their music is group composed, though strongly informed by improvisation and experimentation, with jazz and folk elements in abundance. For the album the band members are Gal Costa (piano, Fender Rhodes, synthesizer, vocals, and co-production), Lilla Ashuach (flute and vocals), Mor Stanislav Porat (bass, vocals, guitar, trumpet, percussion, and co-production), Gilad Sirota (drums), and Rotem Yakobson Aharoni (clarinet, cello, vocals) plus guests on glockenspiel, celesta, percussion, and vocals. The album was several years in the making, and somewhere along that timeline Aharoni left the band, so currently they are a quartet. Mixing and mastering was handled by Udi Koomran, so you can be assured the album sounds superb. The rhythm section offers a level of churning intensity that will surprise, combined with powerful keyboards and melodies driven by the flute and clarinet. The leadoff track is the nine-minute “Azykonu,” launching with some subtle but beautiful piano before the clarinet comes into the picture and the piece begins to build slowly, then around the two-minute mark all of the band is in full action, firing on all cylinders, and one understands clearly why this earns the label avant-prog; the piece continues to evolve over its remaining time, always surprising and never predictable. What we haven’t heard yet as the opener fades down is vocals — that will come on the second track “Letaot,” a most unusual piece that begins in a tango rhythm, using bits of jazz and folk with dark undertones, then at around the three-minute mark the piece revs up and flies out the castle window, by the halfway point we are in a wild improvisational freakout, then it moves into a very heavy section, with pounding bass reminiscent of Magma. Sometimes it seems as if the band is approaching Canterbury territory, incorporating jazzy elements, but then you’ll quickly realize they were going somewhere else entirely. The closing three-part twenty-minute epic, “Carsis,” begins with a crazy busy bundle of impossible rhythms, but nonetheless melodic in their execution, as the piece wanders through vocal and instrumental sections that, from a distance, seem entirely incongruous (but in a good way) as the excitement ebbs and flows throughout its long trajectory. Guts Voyage is most impressive debut, few bands get it this right straight out of the gate, but Shmulikraut has done it.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Shmulikraut

More info
http://shmulikraut.bandcamp.com/album/guts-voyage

 

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