With luminous nostalgia for ’60s psychedelia, Ouzo Bazooka hypnotize listeners with their Middle Eastern elements woven through Mediterranean surf and garage rock.
The Tel Aviv band, formed by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Uri Brauner Kinrot, met their early days with fast-growing popularity in their native Israel, and have since expanded their reach with tours across Europe.
Ouzo Bazooka debuted their unique sound with their self-titled album in 2014 and have gone on to release their EP, Songs from 1001 Nights (2018), and albums Simoom (2016) and Transporter (2019).
Released just two weeks ago, Transporter features singles “It’s A Sin” and “Space Camel,” both accompanied by grainy, vintage music videos where Kinrot, percussionist Ira Raviv and keyboardist Dani Ever Hadni take you back in time to retro crossfades and hallucinatory imagery.
A night with Ouzo Bazooka is sure to send audiences on a phantasmal journey as the band’s lyrics and visuals are known to feature motifs of dreams versus reality, and explicit references to getting high. In pure psychedelic rock fashion, long hippie hair, laser guns and hallucinogenic fruit are the backdrop to these lyrics from “Space Camel” from the album Transporter:
Galloping over quicksand/racing through the naked dunes/jaded by the dust and the sun/you’ll get high on solitude.
Space camel where is your pack?/you know they’re looking for you/man, have you lost your track?/you ran and you never looked back.
Fans of Californian surf and alternative rock will find delight in Ouzo Bazooka’s mystical blends of Western riffs and Middle Eastern scales. Having risen to the ranks as ambassadors of new Middle Eastern rock, Ouzo Bazooka is anybody’s chance to step out of the whitewashed indie rock world and listen to the beauty that diversity has to offer in the creative arts.
