While not quite packing the venue to capacity, rocked everyone in the crowd at Tuesday night with its synthesis of traditional Middle Eastern music and modern hip-hop. Alongside Tomer Yosef’s strong, often swooning vocals, Tamir Muskat, Ori Kaplan and the rest of the six piece act belted out over an hour’s worth of high energy dub-and-Mediterranean pop laced with hypnotic dueling saxophones.
While Yosef stirred the crowd with escalating, rhythmic chants about subjects as topical as racial profiling in airports to the innate happiness of hollering into a microphone, the band continuously built up euphoric tension — and the crowd responded with flailing, jumping and fist pumping. A few instrumentals successfully merged the band’s Middle Eastern thrust with some surf guitar that would make Dick Dale smile, before rocking back into a ferocious version of “Political F*ck,” from its latest record, “Give.”
A clear highlight of the set was a cover of the Specials’ “Ghost Town,” which BBB made sound even spookier and more danceable than the original. The band also showed off a spirited version of “Move It” that brought the house up a few more notches in both temperature and fervor.
Local 12-piece band Atomga opened the night with a raucous set of Latin-laced Afrobeat — and was probably the reason the crowd was so pumped for BBB. Fronted by a stellar horn section, Atomga made the Summitap mid-sizestage look like a crowded bus. The sound, anything but pedestrian, was an inspiring find. Definitely a band to watch for the fusion/Afrobeat crowd.
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Billy Thieme is a Denver-based writer, an old-school punk and a huge follower of Denver’s vibrant local music scene. Follow Billy’s explorations at , and his giglist at .
Andrew Bisset is a Denver photographer and a new contributor to Reverb.
