Fool’s Gold was closing the night of this Echo Park Rising on the Taix Restaurant’s outdoor stage, although many other bands still played past 11 pm at the numerous locations spread along Sunset Boulevard. If you have never heard Fool’s Gold, the first thing you would notice are the omnipresent African guitars and the restless beats, and you may think, do we need another pair of white guys – I am talking about the two founders of the band, vocalist and bassist Luke Top guitarist and Lewis Pesacov – playing African music?
But Fool’s Gold is much more than a Graceland cover band even though the comparison with the likes of Vampire Weekend will undoubtedly cross your mind. It was different, it was Vampire Weekend without the hipster factor and fashionable filter, the quintet sounded closer to the original and their compositions much more hybrid, while exploring music from diverse ethnic origins. With drums and percussions, a bass, two guitars, a synth, even a saxo and Top’s aching vocals, they made the crowd dance to their smooth and hypnotic rhythms, which were going from Afro-beats to more Arabic-inspired influences.
It was an original and rich cocktail, with some authentic South-African bright lead-guitar starting the song and carrying the melody with a high-pitched sound just before the peppy drumbeats would kick, or some almost krautrock-ish moments with a languishing saxo and a tribal drumming digging some interesting grooves. But it was mostly upbeat and buoyant, and so bouncy, like their ‘Surprise Hotel’ or ‘Bark and Bite’ songs, that people were dancing and jumping non-stop during their set. But other songs like ‘Nadine’ exuded something else than just the joyous African rhythms, as they were into more repetitive sonic mantra borrowed from Muslim music.
I guess they would be in the world music section in a store, but what does it mean at the end? Actually, there were many layers under the obvious African one, the song ‘The Dive’ for example, off their last album ‘Leave No Trace’ had some reminiscence of the Smiths, and I am sure I could drop many other band names, so things were not that simple. They closed with a song beginning with an almost a cappella throbbing chant, that could have been the peace song of some lost tribe. And even though some lyrics were sung in Hebrew (yes Hebrew) every person in the crowd was understanding every beat with his or her own body.
