Went to see Itliz today at the Barby. Again, going to see a band I hardly know (except the excellent Maya Dunitz on vocals/keyboards, and I’ve heard of Adam Sheflen on bass). Other than that, I had no idea what music it was going to be.
Unfortunately, the first thing that was evident was that Maya Dunitz wasn’t going to show up. The band members list on the Barby site was woefully inaccurate – no Dunitz, no Talya (which, I’ve heard, is a good thing) and no Uzi Feinerman on guitar.

The band we did get, however, wasn’t bad. Three guitars, drum and bass and they started with a nice instrumental reminiscent of Deep Purple, occasionally aspiring to King Crimsonhood. The rest of the set was more run-of-the-mill grunge/rock/metal. Not bad, but nothing to write home about. Every time they hit a good rocking groove that I could connect to, they veered off somewhere less interesting. A finely-honed well-trained Not-Quite-It machine. I’ll give them a B for effort.

The same, however, cannot be said for the singer/keyboard player they did have, apparently named Sarit. Sarit was, in a word, bad. She has a pretty good voice, but doesn’t really know what to do with it. Badly sung English lyrics (The accent! Oy!), too much screaming, total lack of grace on stage and a general feeling of unprofessionalism surrounded her. And don’t get me started on her solo in the encore. She definitely dragged the whole show down. The songs that were sung by the guitar player or the bass player weren’t too bad (except for the songwriter, whose accent was event worse then hers), but she didn’t even play the keyboards with any sort of redeeming style. All in all, a shame. I’ll give her a D- and drop the total experience down to a C because of it.

A shame, really. They had some potential.