oy Without God is the solo project of 23 year old Boston native and multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Birnbaum, who at his young age has already passed through many musical outlets, from the violent power-electronics of Catholic Skin and the saxophone fronted spazz-rock of The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to stints with Virgin Records new signing Eli Reed and blog-buzz darlings Drug Rug and a continuing membership in the campfire singalong folk-pop group The Tiny Tornadoes.
Growing up in a musical family (brother Adam is a jazz pianist and sister Sara is a classical cellist) and studying the tenor saxophone through high school, Birnbaum initially pursued a career in avant-garde improvised music, performing in NYC with such luminaries as Andrew D’Angelo and Jim Black, and running the short-lived Boston Jazz Composers Collective. Eventually feeling frustrated by the lack of a non-musician audience, he decided to try to bring free jazz into the indie rock world.
His next project, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, bridged free jazz and noise rock, equal parts Albert Ayler and Deerhoof, and performed successfully at rock venues for rock audiences, even securing a slot opening for Deerhoof. Important learning experience also came through tours in The One AM Radio, Drug Rug, and Eli Paperboy Reed & the True Loves, the last of which Birnbaum had been a member for three years.
Since 2006, Birnbaum has been very gradually shifting his focus to his solo songwriting under the Boy Without God name. Recording voraciously starting in late 2006, and often utilizing his unique minute-a-day recording method, he had released six home-recorded EPs and two full-lengths by the start of 2008, all of which are available for free on his myspace. In summer 2008, after an extensive spring house tour, he went into the studio with the recording and production guidance of friend Nick Boyajian, and took a more measured approach in the creation of Your Body Is Your Soul, applying his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to a higher fidelity sound and more carefully considered, highly literate songs.
The result is his most confident work yet, leaps and bounds ahead of the home recordings, combining the complex, dynamic arrangements of his earlier instrumental music with a simple tunefulness and lyrics drawn from anything from hallucinatory dreams to the fiction of Donald Barthelme and Julio Cortazar. Focusing on the important things in life (sex, love, death), YBIYS uses Birnbaum's coarse, Cohen-style baritone to deliver both quick-witted, acoustic love songs (If You, Missiles of Light) and turbulent meditations on human inadequacy (Holy Holy Little Fist, Someone I Love). Every sound on the album (minus one cymbal roll, courtesy drummer Rich Levinson) is made by the man himself, on breathy saxophones and pounding drums, plucked banjos and thrummed upright basses, fender rhodes and choral handclaps and distorted toy keyboards. Birnbaum is a one man symphony, or as poet Shira Erlichman once wrote, “a one man army of light.”
Garnering comparisons to Leonard Cohen, The Magnetic Fields, Bon Iver, and Beirut, Birnbaum's strange mix of folk, pop, and improvised music is compelling, moving and yet impossible to predict.
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