Eszter Balint
Soho Lounge, Saturday, March 20 To the indie-hipster cognoscenti, NYC’s Eszter Balint will always be John Lurie’s smaller, more Hungarian cousin Eva. That’s the totemic power of Jim Jarmusch’s 1983 slo-core cinematic masterpiece, Stranger Than Paradise, the film that single-handedly brought an obscure, skull-wielding bluesman’s manic nightmare vision to millions (fine, thousands) who had never heard Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.” Eva’s been Eszter Balint of late, appearing in Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge and Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog among others. Where she’s really been getting attention, however, is on WFMU where tracks from her recent Bar/None debut Mud have been making an imprint stronger than saurian footprints in Jurassic goop. Like Jarmusch, Balint doesn’t appear to have aged a night in the 21 years since Paradise. That said, Balint’s music – and more importantly her voice – is more than up to the task. It’s not what you’d expect from the willowy Balint, a combination of bluesy art rock with a backing band that included a (sadly nonfunctional) banjo and bassist Michael DuClos, whose firework finger-pops rumbled the walls of the Soho Lounge’s muggy upstairs. Married to Balint’s frenetic violin playing and her keening, lovesick vocals, the show, like Mud, was as far afield from the sleepy-time museum of Stranger Than Paradise as possible. It was all rising tides of volume and a thick, rich, extradark brew of bass and drums that read “File Under Primal, Blues-Inflected Funk.” Strange paradise.This article appears in March 26 • 2004.