The French horn is not an indie instrument. It belongs to orchestras and hunting parties and the opening of Mahler symphonies. Which is presumably why Breindy and Matt Klawansky start their new single with one, alone, for several seconds, before anything else is allowed in.
Veli Yerushalayim is the latest from the Johannesburg husband-and-wife duo who have spent the better part of a decade describing their own genre as "ancient-Hebrew, indie-alternative," a tag that reads like a bit until you hear the records. It has been submitted for Grammy consideration in Best Global Music Performance and Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals. The second is a natural fit. The arrangement is the argument here, an evocative, slowly gathering structure that does considerably more than dress a vocal.
The text is roughly two thousand years old. It's the fourteenth blessing of the Amidah, the central prayer of Jewish liturgy, a request that God return to Jerusalem and rebuild it. Jews have said it three times a day since the Second Temple period, which makes it older than every musical tradition currently competing in the category and most of the instruments in the arrangement.
What Breindy does with it is structural rather than decorative. The horn opens heraldic, then withdraws, and the track resolves into its actual core: her lead vocal, piano, and a glassy electric guitar from Matt that hangs in the air rather than strumming anything. The verse arrives. It arrives again. It keeps arriving, never identically, harmonies accreting behind it each time, textures thickening, rhythm gradually asserting itself. The piano holds the floor while everything above it climbs. Then the whole thing is stripped back to nothing and the accumulation restarts.
It is an additive form, and it maps almost too neatly onto a prayer about building something that keeps not getting built. Whether that's design or accident, it works, and it's the reason the track sustains its length without a chorus doing the heavy lifting.
