no silicon no silicon no silicon no silicon no silicon no silicon no silicon

Silicon seemed to be the word-de-jour just around the time Painting an Overture was recorded - it was all about valleys, 16-year-old-girls' breasts, TV-starlets' lips and a glut of wafers.

Stop here if you're looking to revive that kinda thrill. Anything you'll find in here is carbon based. It starts with a child and finishes a woman. Full grown voice, lips that touch the words like they've touched bodies with love and vigor a thousand times and many times more. But then it comes out again from between the lines, the words, the syllables, the vowels and gasps, a wounded child.

What makes Painting an Overture such a coveted pleasure is not just the delight, not just that old pleasure principal of antici...pation and reward. Quite often, it's the opposite. One is supposed to beg for Forgiveness, perhaps demand it, not slam it into an arrogant face, triumphantly, defiantly, with such fast and furious strumming to evoke the never-was image of Celtic women battling blue faced men.

A child so young sings of a Midlife Island, there must be something missing, or something that shouldn't be there. But as you hear that call you cast aside life as you know it. It's a song totally immersing; evoking something you know you've had and lost. There it is. Something made of the delicate tapestry Suzanne Vega used to shop for when she wore skinny ties.

Who but a child would have the audacity to say I love you as Shani Eliraz does on Name It, and who but a gifted child have the pretension to sound it as it had never been sounded before. It is a cliché, dear, but still it teaches us how those words should be voiced.

Shit, Shani Eliraz has still so much to grow out of and into. Listen to her while she does that.

Dafna Maor
Foreign News Editor, The Marker
Former Tel Aviv Time rock critic