Yoav

His name is Yoav. Not sure about the last name. His music is just starting to creep up on North American radio stations. He released his first album Charmed and Strange last month and is in the midst of a North American tour. Here's a bit of his bio from his website.

The road towards this striking album began in Cape Town in the late 1980s, when a nine-year-old boy began sneaking to his neighbour's house to listen to Wham! and OMD. At Yoav's house, such "light music" was banned, on the insistence of his father, a Jewish architect who lived through World War II in his native Romania, before moving to Israel (where Yoav was born) and then relocating to South Africa with
Yoav's opera singer mother. Only classical and opera would waft through their home.

That only made the pull of modern music stronger for little Yoav.
"From the moment I started listening to those cheesy songs at my neighbour's house,I knew I'd be a musician. I can't describe the rush it gave me. The fact that music was an illicit pleasure actually made it the most exciting thing in the world for me."

By the time he was 12, Yoav was waiting until his parents had gone to bed before quietly practicing on the battered guitar his elder brother had given him. "I'd had to play instruments that I hated since I was four, things like the piano and the cello," he says. "I guess the guitar was my way of rebelling."

As he hit his teenage years, Yoav continued to consume music with an insatiable hunger, always pushing at the boundaries his parents had set. He began with the relatively safe sounds of Simon & Garfunkel and the Beatles, before moving onto the dark pop music of U2, Depeche Mode and The Cure. Phases of devouring hip hop,
grunge and electronic music followed.

Gotta say, the music is frikkin' cool. He uses his guitar to create all his sounds and beats through looped rhythms filtered via guitar pedals. You can hear The Edge's sonic influence and his vocals are pretty ethereal. The song "Club Thing" is being played pretty steadily up here in Toronto on local new music stations.

Watch for him. Could be a breakout artist. You heard it here first. Maybe.

Here's the video for "Club Thing".