“Rare and based” according to random twitter cats. How many times can I say “hipster” without looking lame?
Part one at Simi Lampert’s YU Beacon (opening acts):
After Yellow Red Sky, Max Jared takes the stage. Jared bears an uncanny resemblance to Goldstein from the Harold and Kumar movies, and his music kind of sounds like that. In a good way. He starts off singing his own backup vocals into a looping pedal, playing some acoustic pop. Once his band joins him onstage, the energy level increases. Jared is beatboxing, his drummer is playing breakbeats, and the whole sound is like the “folk-pop-funk” he’d told me to expect. Very much summer music.
Part two at the Jewish Daily Forward:
Around 11:00, Khaled M goes on stage. Khaled is the son of Libyan dissidents by way of Kentucky. He talks with a good ol’ boy drawl, but he’s no redneck. “I grew up with the fake names, moving from country to country. My father was arrested for being part of a student dissident group, he was tortured for five years, he has the scars on his back. This is a really common story for Libyan dissident families — the headquarters of the movement are in Lexington, Kentucky, which is how I ended up there.”
