The Makkabees,

    Vol. Aleph,

    by Jewish would-be rockers, The Makkabees, produced by The

    Brain Factory, illustrates the double-edged sword of

    Jewish-American hybridization. While the joining of these

    two traditions can often feed the churning gears of pop

    culture — see hipster publication Heeb or Larry

    David’s familiar Semitic neuroses on the HBO sitcom “Curb

    Your Enthusiasm” — when the amalgam is created through

    meaningless association, both sides suffer.

   

    The Makkabees

    apply the irate, distortion-heavy panache of heavy metal

    rock to classic Jewish folksongs. They are strong musicians,

    to the extent that the brand of music they play requires

    them to be. Taken out of its religious context, the album is

    a solid, familiar contribution to a genre that has always

    had fairly narrow appeal. While the sound is presented as

    “Heavy Metal versions of your favorite Jewish songs,” it

    might be better described as “Jewish versions of your

    favorite Heavy Metal songs.”

   

    The lyrics are

    those of the simple, Westernized Jewish songs adopted by

    youth group summer camps and ostentatious hotel Bar Mitzvah

    bashes, and the instrumentation is loaded with enough

    pastiche to make heavy metal pioneers Metallica cry paternal

    tears of pride.

   

    The opening

    track, “Shabbat Shalom,” zips by with the simple

    progression of bland power chords and a speedy high-pitch

    guitar solo that set the tone for the rest of the album. “Oseh

    Shalom” features hollering vocals that seem to

    contradict the upbeat nature of the source material. The

    only respite from this explosive mess comes two-thirds of

    the way through, with the melodious “Sh’ma,” a piano ballad

    with a lovely chorus rendition of age-old nighttime prayer

    that hints at a direction the band would do well to take on

    their next project.

   

    As for the

    closer, the press notes tease that “you have not heard ‘Hava

    Nagila’ this hardcore before.” Why should we?

   

   

    Visionary Zionist

    Theodore Herzl believed that the Jewish people would always

    be considered outsiders by secular society. The Makkabees

    reinforce this conviction with a jumble of awkward

    references. Jewish music has been combined with divergent

    sounds and hits the right notes when all the elements

    involved blend together and emerge with material that is of

    entirely its own brand. World Beat, for example, has done

    wonders for the future of klezmer.

   

    But squeezing the

    melodies of timeless Judaic tunes into 20th-century

    counterculture is counterproductive. When The Makkabees’

    energetic frontman growls “Moshiach,” singing the

    famous Lubavitch song anticipating a Jewish savior from

    exile, the irony is as dumbfounding as the distortion is

    deafening.