Review

One of the coolest bands to come from a culture whose popular music barely registers on the radar of U.S. music fans.
In the 2007 Israeli movie The Bubble a young Jewish hipster toils in a Tel Aviv record store where he spins an impeccable list of indie bands, most of whom hail from the U.K. or U.S. That caused my Israeli friend, who accompanied me to the movie, to pitch a hissy. “It’s typical of our Israeli self-hatred,” he groused. “Everything has to come from some other culture to be considered worthy.” If only the character in The Bubble spun less Bright Eyes and more Rockfour.

For the benighted: Rockfour has long been one of the coolest bands to come from a culture whose popular music barely registers on the radar of U.S. music fans, with the possible exception of the late Ofra Haza. By contrast, Rockfour really, well, rocks — and in a pleasingly askew way.

The band's fifth album, Memories of the Never Happened, blends a ten-gallon smoothie of every late ‘60s, psychedelic rock ingredient you could imagine, from It’s a Beautiful Day to Moby Grape to Tranquility. (Ten points for anyone who remembers them.) Rockfour’s earlier albums flew a bit closer to the Byrds and so were more accessible for the newbie. This time they hit on the happy blur of albums like Pink Floyd’s classic 1967 debut Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The vocals of Baruch Ben-Yitzhah cascade through a true swirl of music. It’s trippy stuff, but it never lapses into pretension or losses its toe-hold on tunesmanship. If that’s not enough to give Israel a healthy blip on rock's radar screen, what is?