Comprised of Ben Nir Jacob (vocals, guitar), Yanniv Brenner (Guitar), Amit David (Bass) and Amir Reich (Drums), the up-and-coming Tel Aviv, Israel-based indie rock quartet Document can trace their origins back to 2008. As the story goes, once Jacob had finished college, he moved back to Tel Aviv and began hanging out with his cousin and couple of his friends, and as bored 20-somethings, who were the only ones in their age group listening to Wire, The Fall, Fugazi, Dinosaur, Jr. and others, they decided to start a band and to write and play music together. In their native Israel the indie rock quartet have developed a reputation for writing material that focuses on our obsessions with technology and our increasing disconnection with others, dealing with soulless bureaucracy and corruption, the seemingly endless banality of modern life, and the constant oscillating anxiety, outrage, hope and joy that many of us feel on a regular basis.
The Israeli band’s latest single “Hustle” off their forthcoming album The Void Repeats
will further cement the band’s reputation for crafting material that focuses on modern, daily life — in this case, the sort of digital addiction that removes you from connecting with others or from being in the very moment; where a screen is an extension of one’s life. Interestingly enough, I couldn’t help but think of how I was sitting in a Center City, Philadelphia bar, chatting with two locals, who eventually stopped talking to me to Snapchat endlessly. As the band’s Nir Ben Jacob says of the song, “Phones are the roots that allow us to be connected to everything else. We‘ve rooted ourselves in our modernity. Our identities can change online. We project what we want others to see. The screen has become a mirror. The phone takes away the ability to be intimate, and you are left alone with a distortion of reality. There’s the addiction of immediate gratification, the online approvals are ‘pseudo-pleasure’. This has all led to pointless compulsive behaviour.”
Sonically speaking, the song is a scuzzy and angular post-punk single that’s clearly influenced by the likes of Wire and Gang of Four but it bristles with an ironic and incredibly post modern awareness while possessing incredibly tight, infectious hooks and a cool, self-assuredness beyond their relative youth.
