missFlag - To Infinity Review
To Infinity Is The Debut Album From Israeli Band missFlag
With production handled by respected Los Angeles producer Guy Erez, Israeli band missFlag have released a debut album that bodes well for their upcoming US mini tour.
- Genre: indie / alternative / pop
- Sounds like: Coldplay, Keane, Snow Patrol
- Home: Jerusalem, Israel
- missFlag
From MySpace To Infinity
In this time of MySpace and its ilk often allowing artists to advertise how popular they are by the amount of friends they have, it’s refreshing to find a band who actually justify these numbers with real fans and not just unknown names and faces. It’s especially gratifying when you realise it’s a band who actually have something worth listening to, as is proven by To Infinity, the debut release from missFlag.
With the background to missFlag inextricably linked to overcoming struggle – they hail from Jerusalem and as such are as close to the ongoing Israeli-Palestine conflict as you could want – it would be understandable to expect politics to play a heavy part in the music of missFlag. However, although the lyrics of To Infinity do occasionally hint at political upheaval, they’re never force fed to you. The result is an album of uplifting hope and optimism.
Strength Through Music
Lead song and title track To Infinity is an immediate example of this. missFlag vocalist and front man Ohad Eilam takes us on a journey where light at the end of the tunnel is the only endgame that will be allowed to succeed. With a voice both gentle and soaring, Eilam emits a warmth and humility that only those with hope as their goal can share. And when he intones that ‘it’s time to decide, who’s on my side / the way we fight, the easy way out’, it’s with a clear message that there are no right and wrongs in conflict.
Hidden Thieves is a gentler track, and is one of the songs that first brought missFlag to a larger audience. A soft, hypnotic piece that subtly gains pace throughout, it’s another pertinent example as to why this five piece are currently attracting interest from major labels. Once again, Eilam is almost imploring in his singing, and this is enforced with an almost dramatic soundtrack behind him from keyboardist Gil Assayas and guitarist Assa Bukelman.
Standing Tall Amongst Peers
This feeling continues with Warm Touch, another softer, almost classical-sounding track. With just the hint of Coldplay running through it, Warm Touch is a song that could be imagined as the soundtrack to a montage in a scene from a John Cusack film, such is its immediacy coupled with its cult indie feel.
Yet it’s not just the softer compositions that missFlag can show competency in. With songs like Blinded By Pride, with its almost Damon Albarn and Britpop sound to it, and Twisted Reaching Hands, with its bass driven pop sensibility from Shai Saadia and the fulsome drums of Assaf Kraus, the music in their arsenal shows missFlag have the ability to compete on the bigger stages with the establishment's peers such as Keane and Snow Patrol.
From Present To Future
Perhaps the best example of this maturity in missFlag’s song-writing skills comes with the track Run. Opening with a simplistically strummed acoustic guitar, which leads effortlessly into the full band, it’s a bittersweet love song, with Eilam begging a destructive lover to ‘quit laughing all the time at me / though it always seems that nothing's changed’. Epic in its journey to breaking free from the lover in question, it’s a glorious mix of tempos that charts the up-and-down perils of love.
It’s this very maturity that has attracted so much attention missFlag’s way. Despite the band having only formed just over a year ago, such is the buzz being spread about them that it has led to showcase gigs for various media and labels in Los Angeles and Boston. To Infinity itself was produced by none other than respected producer Guy Erez, who has worked with artists such as Gypsy Kings and Ryan Cabrera, an impressive statement of how far this band has come. With the release of To Infinity showing that the band have the songs to support the talent, it’s surely only the beginning of how far they can go.
