Even Simi Lampert thinks they rock.
The two women, Dalia Shusterman and Perl Wolf, are both Crown Heights chabadnicks with unusually talented musical abilities. They paired up earlier in the year, after Shusterman’s family moved from L.A. to Brooklyn, and have since produced a four-track E.P. An upcoming full album is in the works.
With luscious sheitels and a rainbow of lipstick colors, Wolf and Shusterman keep things classy in more ways than one. They pair sheer stockings with stilettos while on stage, but only play for an all-female audience. This is due to adherence to the laws of Kol Isha, where a woman’s voice can’t be heard by a man (lest she arouse in him his unquenchable lust).
But, from the way they tell it, they don’t mind keeping things female. “Women will party and rock out in a completely different way when there’s nobody there but women,” Wolf, 26, told the New York Post. They hope that their music will be an inspiration to religious women who have musical passions.
Though they have tried to keep their music in the woman’s realm, it has begun seeping through the edges (an activity that the Internet tends to facilitate), and members of the Lubavitch community in Crown Heights are not so pleased. Shusterman and Wolf acknowledge that once their music is recorded it is possible that men may hear it, but they don’t let that stop them. “The deal is that it’s not a women’s mitzvah not to play,” explained Shusterman to The Times of Israel. “It’s a man’s mitzvah not to listen. Anyone who knows halacha will tell you this.”
The New York Post cites their “shtick” as “a cross between Fiona Apple and Adele, with influences from Radiohead, the White Stripes and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” Sounds pretty good to us!
Listen here to singles such as Vagabond’s Wagon and Frigid City. But only if you got all your YY chromosomes intact!
