The Swastika E.P.

Dan Bern | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 12, 2002)
• Original Release Date: November 12, 2002
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Messenger Records
• ASIN: B0000C0VOB
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #301,275 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

About the Artist

Over the course of his five official recordings and the many EPs, performance-only specials, and soundtrack contributions the man and his lethal guitar have recorded since 1997, Dan Bern has been finding the big picture in the small — whether plumbing the infinite sadness of being Van Gogh’s overlooked son or describing a horrific breakup through the gentle light of an Italian holiday. He processes the monumental, sifting through the rubble of increasingly distant youth and devastating world events, and comes up with gems of insight and emotion.

Bern is reflexively literate, in the style of his favorite authors, including L.A.'s legendary bohemians Charles Bukowski and John Fante, urbane fantasist James Thurber, and yarn-spinning humorist Ring Lardner. He's in love with the power of words to turn on themselves, to frolic, to bite, and his strong, friendly voice can go from earnest to ferocious within seconds.

The nomadic Bern, a Mid-westerner-turned-Angeleno now residing in fittingly quirky Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, has always had an outsider’s wry vision. He grew up in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, informed equally by the wholesome wheatiness which inspired his longtime passion for sports in general and baseball in particular, and his Jewish immigrant parents’ artistic leanings (he played cello as a child) before decamping for the West Coast neo-folk scene in the early 1990s, where he began his professional career.

Being captivated by Dan is the easy part; describing his music to the non-initiated is more difficult. One journalist tried: "topical-poetical-sarcastic-punk-folk." An admirable effort, further elaborated by the New York Times: "He veers from comedy to anger, conjectures to shaggy-dog stories; he takes sidelong approaches to theology, science fiction, consumer culture, art, love and baseball."

Product Description

Just when it seemed as if the American scene couldn't get any messier, along comes Dan Bern to add his particular brand of spice to the fire with the brilliant new The Swastika EP. As always, the incomparable Iowan proves to be a lightning rod to the most sensitive and disturbing issues, the ones that we all are now faced with confronting in the post-9/11 version of America.

As on his previous full-length recording, the highly acclaimed New American Language, Dan uses the five songs here to say the things many of us think, few of us have the courage to admit, yet all of us need to hear about the current state of the nation. Not many songwriters are capable of eliciting the belly laughs that Dan does as he sings about the creeping totalitarianism of yellow terror alerts, government-sanctioned snooping, and stealth disinformation, not to mention the plight of the poor, unfortunately named "Al Kida" in Cleveland, Ohio.

But Dan also has bigger dictators to fry, and he does just that with "My Little Swastika," on which he reclaims the swastika as the ancient, sacred symbol of peace and prosperity, life and luck, that it represented for millennia before its appropriation and perversion at the hands of the Nazis. In the process he takes out Hitler and his whole propaganda machine with a potent, rockabilly of a right hook. "Lithuania," the EP's anchor and a longtime concert favorite of fans, too deals in both direct and oblique ways with the Holocaust‹of which Dan's parents were survivors‹and the extraordinary Jewish contribution to America's intellectual and cultural tradition, from Albert Einstein to Groucho Marx to Leonard Bernstein to Sandy Koufax. It closes the album on an appropriately haunting note.

Dan Bern and the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy may not be intent on unilateral world domination. But they certainly have rock & roll nailed down. Also check out Dan's book and CD "World Cup: A Sort of Travel Diary"

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great EP. Five great songs for five bucks., January 25, 2009

By 

J. Polsgrove "Southwestdeadhead" (Baja Arizona) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Swastika E.P. (MP3 Download)

I've got everything Dan's got available, so this was bought during my "get the rest of 'em" phase. I bought it for the Talkin' Al Kida Blues, which is hilarious. Lithuania is an interesting homage of sorts to his father's home country.

If you haven't discovered Dan Bern, start with his self-titled 1997 commercial debut release (though there's an indie recording available for download from '96) and also grab as a download Smartie Mine, since it's over forty bucks if you buy it as a CD. The two will give you a good intro to a great, overlooked artist -- perhaps best described as a unique blend of Dylan, Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, and Steve Earle. He pulls no punches and tells it like he sees it. Great stuff!