Charlie Bertsch

Charlie Bertsch has been music editor of Zeek and Tikkun. He was also a longtime contributor to Punk Planet and was one of the founders of the pioneering electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life.

Arts and Culture

All the Taste Without the Flavor: Charlotte Gainsbourg's IRM

By Charlie Bertsch

Collaborating with Beck, who wrote most of the songs, Charlotte Gainsbourg produces tasteful alternative rock with wide-ranging appeal on IRM. But the music is too cautious, resulting in an album that’s easy to like but hard to love.

Arts and Culture

Talking About WHOSE Generation? The Super Bowl in Music

By Charlie Bertsch

Although the majority of the players in the Super Bowl were African-American and many of the league’s most devoted fans are people of color, the use of the Arcade Fire to score the NFL’s commercial for itself reinforced a message conveyed by inviting the half-Who to play the halftime show: the league’s priority is to satisfy white, middle-class viewers.

Arts and Culture

A Chill To Warm the Heart: Mark Glanville and Alexander Knapp's A Yiddish Winterreise

By Charlie Bertsch

This remarkable song cycle repurposes Yiddish folk songs according to the logic of Franz Schubert’s famous Winterreise, turning his tale of a heartbreak into an allegory of the Holocaust.

Arts and Culture

Waiting for the Monsoon: Howe Gelb Leads Us Through the Desert

By Charlie Bertsch

Whether as a solo artist or as the leader of the long-lived alternative band Giant Sand, this self-proclaimed “Meanderthal” from Tucson suggests that the safest distance between two points is probably not the shortest.

Arts and Culture

Scavenging in the Ghost Town: Hyperdub Comes of Age

By Charlie Bertsch

With a two-disc compilation celebrating its fifth anniversary, Steve Goodman’s Hyperdub label honors the musical identity that fans have come to expect from its products while foraging for a different future. The rare example of popular culture that manages to politicize aesthetics without making its art suffer for it, Hyperdub’s best releases explore the predicament of postmodern identity and then show their audience a way out.

Arts and Culture

A Fitting End? The Ex's Latest Record Testifies To a Remarkable Career

By Charlie Bertsch

Heard from start to finish, 30 doesn’t suggest a detour from The Ex’s original goal so much as a widening of the route leading there. From the spare punk feel of “Rules” through the more tonally varied performances on “State of Shock”, “Frenzy” and “Ethiopian hagere,” the band’s sound has consistently foregrounded rhythm over melody. Most tracks, here and on their studio albums, give listeners little time to rest. But despite that insistently propulsive character, they are curiously refreshing, a reminder that moving forward often takes less energy than standing still.

Arts and Culture

The Timing of Transformation: A Record Makes Its Way Back To the Top of the Stack

By Charlie Bertsch

There’s something about Oren Ambarchi and z’ev’s Spirit Transform Me that makes ad hoc montage curiously appropriate. One way to think about a work of this nature, with its lack of melody and wariness of regular patterns, is to regard it as an invitation to tear down the walls created through the division of mental labor. The spirit, in this interpretation, manifests itself in the urge to experience it’s components as a singular whole.

Arts and Culture

Personal Best: The Decade in Music

By Charlie Bertsch

An idiosyncratic list of the past decade’s best albums – scroll to the end of the piece – with meditations on why idiosyncrasy may be all music criticism has left to offer.

Arts and Culture

From Yaz To Yas: Arabology Fleshes Out Dancefloor Dreams in a New Idiom

By Charlie Bertsch

This record translates – and in a carefully pre-meditated way – the infectious pop sensibility of New Wave icons like Yaz into an Arabic idiom. Songs like “Get It Right”, “Mahi” and “Yaspop” have all the right moves for the dancefloor, but also remind us that the opportunities for someone like Yasmine Hamdan to strut her stuff are largely confined to the experience of exile. This is music for an Arab Diaspora missing the comforts of home, in a musical language it can only indulge publicly in hostile foreign lands.

Arts and Culture

Just a Shot Away: The Fortieth Anniversary of Gimme Shelter

By Charlie Bertsch

Gimme Shelter bears witness to a world in which there’s no longer any place to hide. Although the film shows us The Rolling Stones at the height of their powers, the ultimate lesson it imparts is that charismatic leadership shrinks to human size before those who refuse to look the other way.