Good music, like any other kind of good art, reveals
something about the artist, be it their worldview, or their experiences, or
whatever it is at the time that’s inside their heart. For Yashiv Cohen, his art
is the music he makes with his band, Men of North Country. That music is a biography,
though written with instruments, notes and scales rather than a word processor.
The band is a rock and soul band headquartered in
Tel Aviv. The music borders on the utterly infectious thanks to the band’s
seamless melding of Stax/Motown style horns, driving rock beats and rhythms
that bridge the two with amazing ease.
“We play with a rock
and roll attitude,” Cohen revealed, “but we add horns and have that Motown
thing going on. We have fans, but the mainstream media here in Israel doesn’t seem to get
us.” Cohen talked to Garagerocktopia both by telephone
and email. Despite a beastly connection
and your humble blogger’s technical ineptitude, Cohen patiently schooled us up
on all things MONC.
But if you like the kinds of music we chronicle on
this blog, you’ll have no trouble at all getting it. If there’s one word you
could use to describe the music of Men of North Country, it’s lively.
Whether it’s a great rocker like “Magic,” a
top-notch old-school pop song like “Pandora,” the soulfulness of “Man of North
Country,” or a terrific cover of the Who’s “The Seeker,” the band manages to
capture the best parts of the sounds of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but make music that’s
100% this decade.
The band also includes drummer/producer
Boaz Wolf; guitarist/composer Doron Farhi; bassist Jonathan Ydov; Ongy Sizzling
on saxophone, and Maayan Milo on trombone. In addition to MONC, Cohen is part of another
Tel Aviv soul act, the Faithful Brothers.
MONC was born at a club where Cohen had been the
evening’s DJ. A friend overheard Cohen singing some of the songs he had just
been spinning, and heard something that maybe more people should be hearing, too.
I started as a DJ,”
Cohen said. “In fact, I’m still a DJ. I was a bit drunk, and a friend who heard
me singing said ‘let’s start a band.’ We did a couple of rehearsals and not
much came of it. The idea stuck, though, and I started writing lyrics.
‘Man of North Country’ was our first single. I sent the lyrics to Doron,
who was then our bass player, and now guitarist, that composed it and recorded
a demo with Boaz, our drummer, in Boaz’s living room. He sent it to me and I
said ‘wow, we should record this.’
Perhaps not so oddly, as we’ll discuss in a moment,
they gained an attentive ear not so much in their native Israel, but a little
further away in the United Kingdom.
“We didn’t even get to
shop it around,” said Cohen, “and then suddenly we get an email from London’s
Acid Jazz label. They asked us if we had more. We said sure although we didn’t,
and wrote and recorded more right away.”
We need not give you a history lesson on the
founding of Israel, but the detail that’s important to note here is that it was
founded and settled by people from all over the world, amongst them Cohen’s
grandparents.
“The kibbutz where I grew
up was built by people coming from two main places,” Cohen recounted. “one of
them being the USA, so I grew up with this American inclination, including a
lot of American music. Some of it was soul music, which I loved from a young
age. In later years I discovered deep soul through the now legendary Dave
Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures, and my
love for that music really started.”
Cohen, of course, was far from being the first
non-American to fall in love with the African-American popular music of that
era. Starting well before the British Invasion, blues, soul, r&b, funk slowly
gained legions of devotees the world over, a phenomenon that, thanks to rap,
continues to this day.
One place where those musical genres would take hold
even more strongly was northern England.
What happened would really be more properly covered in a book. The short version, though, is that a whole new
British phenomenon, very vital and very vibrant, would soon arise.
Many young people in the ‘60s and ‘70s resigned
themselves to lives working in bleak factories and settling in dreary housing
tracts. While their lot was far better than African-Americans living in the Jim
Crow South or in the big city ghettoes of the north, they nonetheless felt a
kinship with the desperation expressed in music from across the Atlantic. The
Rolling Stones, the Who and the
Yardbirds would adopt blues and make it reverberate in the UK, in North America
and pretty much everywhere else.
Other British takes on African-American music – some
of them quite good – wouldn’t spread nearly as far. One of those was Northern
Soul. .
A precise definition for Northern Soul is a little tricky to narrow down. Broadly, it was a club scene and collection of fans who gravitated to lesser known soul music from the United States. Along the way its devotees created a kind of subculture which resonates to this day. Artists like Lisa Stansfield and John Newman would carry on that legacy in their own music.
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| Manchester's Wigan Casino, a noted center for Northern Soul |
“From there, I
discovered Northern Soul,” said Cohen, “which to me, is the liveliest music
there is. That got me starting the Tel Aviv Soul Club, and that also led me to the Mod subculture. I could feel what all those white kids in the ‘60s felt like.”
While MONC’s music drips with soul, they also bear
the strong influence of mod, both pre-and post-Who, as well as punk and
post-punk. Cohen offers no apologies at looking at previous decades –
particularly the 1960s and 1970s -- for inspiration. He feels that, along the
way, something has been lost.
“For me, the ‘60s was a
decade that celebrated freedom,” Cohen explained. “The ‘70s seemed more about
justice and in both those decades, it all came out in the music.”
After a few singles, MONC released their first full
album, The North, in 2012. Their second
album, This City, was released in 2016.
The band also has an EP, and Cohen told us, the band is currently
working on a third album.
Cohen drew the distinctions between MONC’s first two
albums, narratives that explain the different Cohens. The one arriving in the
big city from the sticks, and the one who was now a longtime dweller in Tel
Aviv.
“I came from a little
kibbutz in the north of Israel,” recounted Cohen, “very far towards the
northern border, and on our first album, we explored the tension that one feels
between life in a small village and in a big city.”
The theme of moving from the farms and the country
to a big, cosmopolitan city is, of course, a universal that people from every corner
of the world can relate to. Cohen said that MONC found a way to express it in a
way that turned heads far beyond the Tel Aviv city limits.
“It definitely wasn’t a
city album,” Cohen explained. “The first album was more open, both musically
and lyrically, much looser, freer and more open.”
The second album was written post-transformation
from country boy to city slicker. Like so many of the world’s big cities, Tel
Aviv is a cultural dynamo, sporting more different kinds of people – and kinds
of music – than we’d ever be able to detail here. And MONC’s second album reflects how living and
mixing with those cultures changed Cohen and the band.
“Our second album was
much more something of the big city” said Cohen. “After 15 years of living in
Tel Aviv, I knew much more about life – and much more about music."
While Men of North Country has an audience at home –
Tel Aviv does have a measurable soul scene – the band finds the largest part of
its fan base in Europe. The UK has been especially welcoming of the band, who
has been the guests of the BBC’s Craig Charles, long-time host of his prestigious
soul and funk program on Radio 6. The band will be visiting England yet again for
some dates in mid-August.
“We’re much more popular
in Europe than we are here in Israel,” said Cohen. “I’m not exactly sure why –
perhaps we don’t do enough publicity. Also, our music is very un-Israeli music.
Like everywhere else, hip hop is big here, and more funky stuff, as is rock and
roll on its whiter side.”
Sadly, a visit to North America by MONC does not
appear to be in the near future. Like most of the bands we profile on
Garagerocktopia, all members have day jobs. Plus, being a large band with a
brass section, the logistics of an America tour – where, unlike Europe, dates
would likely be spread out over very long distances with tons of travel time –
don’t work to the band’s favor.
“Well, there’s six of
us, so it’s not a small band,” said Cohen. “First, we’d have to get there, then
we’d have to drive around a very big place. We can’t do that right now, not without
some backing, anyway.”
While MONC’s albums have
been well-received, like most artists who play the style of music they do, it’s
often tough to capture what the band is really about on a recording. The group
has a dandy of a closer that, sadly, for right now, you only get to hear if you’re
lucky enough to have them come to your town.
“’Rari’ by the Standells, that usually ends our shows” said Cohen. “Since it’s a 7-8 minute
version that builds, it’s more challenging to put it on tape successfully. I
think that since our music is pretty ‘lively,’ that comes out best in person. Putting
something like that on tape (or digital files) is quite a challenge.”
We have some other features already in the works here at Garagerocktopia. Artists have been sending us some very cool stuff. As always, we don’t make any guarantees in stone but we’re happy to say we’ve gotten a lot of very promising music sent to us, and we’re always happy to spread the word about about bands that are playing the way-out kinds of music we profile here. Send us a line and we’ll talk.
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